A piece notes the transition in Uzbekistan, “The first time in 25 years, Uzbekistan has a new president, after Shavkat Mirziyoyev, a former prime minister, won an overwhelmingvictory with 88.6 percent of the vote held on Sunday. Mirziyoyev, who served as acting president since the death of longtime ruler Islam Karimov on September 2, faces a bevy of political, economic, and geopolitical challenges as he seeks to fill Karimov’s very big shoes.

The election, at least, showed signs of continuity with the previous regime: The 59-year-old Mirziyoyev ran against three other candidates, all from pro-government parties, and the election was criticized by the the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which said the vote was “devoid of genuine competition.” And Mirziyoyev, who has a reputation for brutality, said that he intends to ape Karimov’s blueprint for governing, which was characterized by endemic corruption and brutal human rights abuses.

But in his time as interim president, Mirziyoyev has also hinted at the possibility of reform in Uzbekistan. That’s because of the very real threats posed by mass migration and Islamist extremism, and especially Uzbekistan’s economic stagnation. Mirziyoyev is taking steps to loosen constraints on the country’s currency, and cutting red tape that has hindered businesses and scared off foreign investment.

“[Mirziyoyev] is trying to firm up his support and show he is a legitimate president,” Paul Stronski, a Central Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, told Foreign Policy.

The issue of legitimacy looms over Uzbekistan’s new presidency. Karimov’s demise sparked fears of a power battle among the elites, but the country’s regional clans quickly grouped around Mirziyoyev, bypassing the constitution, which mandated that Uzbekistan’s Senate leader should have taken over the interim position ahead of elections.

Moreover, Mirziyoyev now has the difficult task of replacing Karimov, Uzbekistan’s larger-than-life founding father who ruled the country since 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.

“Karimov was a mythological figure. There was respect for him regardless of the policies,” Bakhti Nishanov, deputy director for Eurasia at the International Republican Institute, told FP. “People would blame other officials for problems, but never the president.”

Mirziyoyev will find out soon if such treatment comes with the office. As president, he will inherit the most populous country in a Central Asia battered by economic headwinds from two of its biggest financial partners: Russia and China. Cheap oil and Western sanctions drove Russia into recession which in turn has cut into remittances from the 2 million Uzbek migrants working there. China’s economic slowdown, meanwhile, has cooled investment in the region.

Without action to boost economic growth at home and attract foreign investors, Mirziyoyev risks being left with a national economy increasingly reliant on shrinking remittances. The Central Bank of Russia has reported only $952 million worth of remittance transfers in the first half of 2016, down from $6.63 billion in 2013, prior to the fall in oil prices and Western sanctions against the Kremlin.

Amid the bleak economic picture, Mirziyoyev has sought to repair relations with neighbors in Central Asia. On December 2, Uzbekistan resumed flights to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, after a 24-year break. In November, Mirziyoyev’s interim government indicated a willingness to resolve longstanding border disputes with Kyrgyzstan, which have existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Mirziyoyev has been cagier in dealing with larger powers in the region, including Washington. Shortly after Karimov died, Mirziyoyev said he would follow his predecessor’s more recent example and not join any international military alliances or host any foreign military bases. Karimov became an unsavoury U.S. ally during Washington’s “war on terror,” hosting a U.S. air base on Uzbek soil for the war in Afghanistan. But after U.S. criticism of a brutal government massacre of civilians, Karimov closed the base in 2005. Relations warmed slightly under in the Obama administration and Uzbekistan played a role on so-called Northern Distribution Network, serving as a transit hub for NATO material to and from the Afghan front.

Uzbekistan’s new president looks set to retain its independence and balance external powers, but with a struggling economy, Mirziyoyev may be more willing to accommodate Moscow or Washington to attract foreign investment.

“Youth unemployment is very high and the young people are coming back from Russia,” said Nishanov. “They have to try to fix the economy to keep things stable.”

“A cease-fire agreement between Syria’s government and the country’s mainstream rebel groups has gone into effect in the war-ravaged nation. The truce was brokered by both Russia and Turkey, who support opposing sides in the war. It took effect at midnight Thursday. The agreement is a potential breakthrough in the six-year civil war that has left more than a quarter-million people dead and triggered a refugee crisis across Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin says that if the truce holds, it will be followed by peace talks next month in Kazakhstan between Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government and opposition groups”.

A piece in Foreign Affairs discusses what China will gain from Trump, “China bashing has been a staple of U.S. populist politics for three decades, and the 2016 election was no exception. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly promised to stand up to China and hold it accountable to international trade rules, but the exact wording of her statements usually left her enough wiggle room to avoid action if necessary. President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-trade, anti-China rhetoric, however, unambiguously bound him to decisive action.

Now that he is headed for the Oval Office, Trump will have to make some difficult choices regarding which campaign promises to keep and how to keep them. With Republicans in control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, he won’t be able to blame Congress if he fails to deliver. In fact, he could make good on most of his promises on trade and China through executive action, without Congressional approval. U.S. President Barack Obama’s penchant for governing by executive order means that many of his initiatives can be reversed with the stroke of a pen. Expect a quick end, for example, to U.S.-Chinese cooperation on climate change.

At the very beginning of his campaign, Trump pledged to label China a currency manipulator on day one in office (a promise Republican nominee Mitt Romney also made, in 2012). Trump has also vowed to take legal action against Beijing (domestically and at the World Trade Organization) and to slap punitive tariffs on China if it “does not stop its illegal activities.” Not much wiggle room there.

On top of all this is Trump’s pledge to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s flagship trade, investment, and intellectual property deal. In theory, the TPP should attract broad support from the U.S. political establishment. In practice, it has become politically toxic. Primarily a tool for spreading U.S. interests abroad, Trump has portrayed it as a Trojan horse for foreign—and ultimately Chinese—influence.

Those were the campaign promises. What is the reality? President Trump’s China policy is likely to be much less aggressive than candidate Trump’s. His language may not have been as carefully chosen as Clinton’s, but his stance is not as extreme as it may appear. China probably has little to fear from Trump. And it may even stand to gain.

Trump has loudly, repeatedly, and unequivocally promised to instruct his secretary of the treasury to label China a “currency manipulator” on day one of his presidency. There is little reason to doubt his commitment to do so. Everyone knows that China is a currency manipulator and has been for the last 40 years. All countries take actions to manage their currencies, but China is more overt about it than most. Diplomatic politesse is the only reason China has dodged the label for so long.

The problem for Trump is that these days, China is more likely to be manipulating its currency up. Most countries accused of currency manipulation are accused of doing the opposite: a weak currency boosts export competitiveness. In fact, of the six countries on the U.S. Treasury Department’s currency manipulation watch list, five are depressing the values of their currencies.

By contrast, China has intervened heavily in foreign currency markets “to prevent a rapid RMB depreciation,” according to a recent U.S. Treasury Department report. The communiqué goes on to note that over the last year China has “sold more than $570 billion in foreign currency assets to prevent more rapid RMB depreciation.” That represents an enormous market intervention to keep the RMB strong—and make Chinese exports less competitive.

China has not been manipulating its currency as a gift to U.S. exporters. It has been intervening to gain accession to the International Monetary Fund’s global benchmark basket of currencies and to put a lid on the massive capital flight of late 2015 and early 2016. So although China clearly is a currency manipulator, and Trump’s Treasury Department might label it as such, the only realistic remedy would be for Washington to continue monitoring China. Right now, Beijing’s actions are helping U.S. exporters, not hurting them.

Trump’s threat to start a trade war with China is a more serious concern. Here the issue is big steel. Steel is a politically sensitive topic in Midwestern states such as Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio—states that propelled Trump to the presidency. With an eye to 2020, Trump can ill afford to be seen as weak on steel.

But widespread media panic over the possibility that Trump will place tariffs on Chinese steel is largely overblown. The United States routinely slaps punitive tariffs on Chinese exports. For example, in May the Obama administration hit China with tariffs of 451 percent for corrosion-resistant steel and 522 percent for flat-rolled steel. Chinese tires, chemicals, and other products also face heavy anti-dumping duties. The global economy has not ground to a halt.

Given extensive Chinese state intervention in its steel industry (which is largely state-owned), U.S. trade protection against Chinese steel is inevitable. The question isn’t whether to act; it is about how much action to take. The prior existence of relatively uncontroversial Obama administration tariffs in the range of 500 percent doesn’t offer much room for concern about Trump’s future actions on steel.

Some of Trump’s vaguer statements on the campaign trail—for example, that all Chinese exports enjoy unfair trade subsidies of anywhere from 20 to 45 percent—do not bind him to slapping indiscriminate tariffs on all Chinese-made goods. In any case, Trump’s allegations of unfair competition are probably true. Labor and environmental standards in China are atrocious, and state subsidies are rife.

But tariffs are unlikely in industries where there are no major U.S. competitors for Chinese imports, or where goods are manufactured in China by U.S. companies. Industries that may once have been politically sensitive, such as electronics and footwear, no longer are. Trump is more likely to place duties on high-value durable goods, such as subway carriages and specialized construction equipment. These moves won’t make the national headlines, but they will help Trump on the stump in 2020, when he will have to convince Midwestern voters that he delivered on his trade promises.

A GIFT TO CHINA

China’s biggest cause for cheer is that the populist turn seems to have ended all possibility that the United States will ratify the 12-country TPP. The agreement will only enter into operation if at least six of the countries involved, constituting 85 percent of the group’s GDP, ratify it. That means without the United States, there will be no TPP.

The TPP is highly controversial for many reasons, but one thing is clear: it is a United States–centered trade agreement that strongly favors U.S. interests. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly warned that if the TPP came into force, China would eventually “enter the TPP through the back door at a later date.” He didn’t seem to understand that the whole point of the TPP is to set the rules of twenty-first century trading without input from China, then make China agree to those rules in order to join.

Trump’s unequivocal pledge to dump the TPP even compelled Clinton, who had once called the deal “the gold standard,” to disavow it. Now the Obama administration has publicly proclaimed that it will not lobby Congress to ratify the TPP during the lame duck session, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has clearly stated that the bill will not be brought to a vote this year.

Killing the TPP may be the one great gift that Trump (and the rest of the dysfunctional U.S. political establishment) gives to China. When Trump set out on this political odyssey a year and a half ago, he gave a rambling kick-off speech in which he said over and over again how much he loves China. He said that China’s leaders are smarter and more capable than our own. The self-inflicted death of the TPP may just prove him right.

“Russia on Friday announced plans to expel 35 U.S. diplomats and ban U.S. diplomatic staff from using a dacha and a warehouse in Moscow in retaliation to Washington’s sanctions, Russian news agencies reported. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted by the agencies as saying he had proposed the measures to President Vladimir Putin

An excellent article examines how Mongolia is pushing back against China, “The day before the Dalai Lama’s November 18 trip to Mongolia, Beijing issued a “strong demand” to its neighbour to cancel the visit of the “anti-Chinese separatist” or face (unstated) consequences. The Dalai Lama would be making his ninth visit to the sparsely populated nation of 3 million people, just to China’s north. Previous visits triggered retaliation from China, including the temporary closure of parts of the Sino-Mongolian border.

Just like in the past, Ulaanbaatar ignored the warnings. Befitting a nation where a majority of the population practices a form of Buddhism derived from Tibet, Mongolian officials described the visit as purely religious in nature. The Dalai Lama attracted crowds of thousands during his four-day trip. He visited monasteries, preached to admiring worshippers at a gigantic sports facility (built with Chinese aid), and made a star appearance at an international conference on “Buddhist science.”

But in a press conference, the Dalai Lama slammed China for interfering with his travels. He also announced that the next spiritual leader of Mongolia, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, considered the third most important lama, after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, has been born. That controversial move is likely to anger Beijing, which has long sparred with the Dalai Lama over the right to appoint Buddhist reincarnations. After the Dalai Lama left on Nov. 23, Beijing indefinitely postponed bilateral meetings between the two nations, casting doubts over Ulaanbaatar’s hopes to obtain badly needed soft loans and economic aid.

President Xi Jinping has repeatedly spoke about the win-win nature of China’s rise. China’s outreach to its neighbors through its massive One Belt, One Road initiative promises regional economic growth, peace, and stability. And Beijing advertises equality and non-interference as hallmarks of its foreign policy: different, it says, from foreign policies of the old great powers. But

Beijing’s efforts — and embarrassing inability — to force Mongolia’s compliance with its political demands expose a more sinister face of China’s friendship.

Beijing’s efforts — and embarrassing inability — to force Mongolia’s compliance with its political demands expose a more sinister face of China’s friendship.

The history of China’s relations with Mongolia shows that raw pressure and intimidation can backfire in unexpected ways. One particularly relevant example concerns Beijing’s efforts to sway Mongolia following the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict. In 1959, following the outbreak of an anti-Chinese rebellion in Tibet, the then 23-year-old Dalai Lama fled to India. Beijing never forgave him for leaving, nor forgave India for giving him refuge. Relations between Beijing and New Delhi, until then hailed as a shining example of peaceful coexistence, tanked. Border tensions escalated, and in October 1962, the two neighbors went to war in the Himalayas.

Although China won the battle, the real challenge was to persuade the world that the Indians were the bad guys — a matter complicated by the reality that Beijing attacked India, not the other way around. The task fell to the founding father of Chinese diplomacy, Zhou Enlai, who spent weeks explaining China’s take on the conflict to disconcerted regional players like Indonesia and Sri Lanka. In December 1962, Zhou attempted to convince the Mongolians to endorse the Chinese point of view. The records of his dramatic encounter with then Mongolian Prime Minister Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal have recently been declassified by the Mongolian Foreign Ministry, and are now accessible online. They make for sober reading.

Tsedenbal, who came to China to sign a border treaty and to ask for economic aid, seemed surprised when Zhou unexpectedly raised the subject of India. Zhou recounted the highlights of the Sino-Indian border confrontation, and condemned the Indians for selling out to U.S. imperialism and for pursuing anti-Chinese policies. Tsedenbal reacted by saying meekly that he was sorry that China and India had quarreled. “I don’t understand what you mean by being sorry about the Sino-Indian conflict,” Zhou pressed. It was a matter of black and white: China was right, India was wrong. There could not be neutrality in the question. But Tsedenbal would not budge, telling Zhou that quarreling with India over an uninhibited strip of land in the Himalayas would only force the Indians to turn to the West, and that would not help China’s cause. Zhou nearly lost it: his face “twisted in anger,” noted the record-taker.

After this inauspicious beginning, the talks rapidly went downhill. Tsedenbal asked Zhou to help resolve the problem of Chinese workers in Mongolia. These workers had become rebellious and were declaring strikes; would Beijing tell them to behave, and send more workers, which Mongolia badly needed? In response, Zhou connected the workers problem and Mongolia’s unwillingness to endorse China’s political positions.

The two continued to argue to the point that, according the Mongolian record, Zhou literally jumped from his chair in anger. “You don’t need to get angry,” Tsedenbal pleaded with Zhou, “just speak calmly.” Zhou accused the prime minister of trying to “lecture” him. The then Mongolian Ambassador to China,

Dondogiin Tsevegmid, present at the meeting, recalled that the conversation became so heated that he thought the two men “would come to blows.”

Dondogiin Tsevegmid, present at the meeting, recalled that the conversation became so heated that he thought the two men “would come to blows.”

After this unpleasant encounter — the last time the two men saw each other — relations between China and Mongolia worsened. China curbed economic aid, and by 1964 had pulled out its workers from the country. Mongolia turned to the Soviet Union for protection, and the Russians sent an army, which they did not completely withdraw until after the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Tsedenbal remained one of the bitterest critics of China. It was on his watch that the Dalai Lama first visited Mongolia, in June 1979.

What was behind Zhou’s embarrassingly ineffective performance? Yes, the Chinese Premier, generally known for his refinement and tact, was under pressure at home to comply with Mao Zedong’s radical leftist agenda. But his brutal effort to impose the Chinese viewpoint on a visiting leader — in this case a leader of a neighboring country, which, he knew all too well, depended on China’s largesse — had the opposite effect from what he probably intended. In the early 1960s, some in the Mongolian leadership advocated a softer line on China. But Beijing’s pressure made it politically impossible to defend closer ties with China: anyone doing so risked alienation as a sell-out and as an agent of Chinese influence.

The problem was that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party could not tolerate opposing opinions. Mao had brutally crushed domestic dissent. He applied the same yardstick internationally: one was either with him or against him; there was no middle ground to accommodate cautious neutrality like Tsedenbal’s. At the surface, it was all about equality and non-interference. But just below, there was the expectation that others would kowtow to your demands, and anger and retribution when they refused.

Today’s China is vastly more powerful than China of the 1960s. But it is hardly more cognizant that bullying others into submission is not a useful method for winning friends

Today’s China is vastly more powerful than China of the 1960s. But it is hardly more cognizant that bullying others into submission is not a useful method for winning friends, especially among neighboring countries, which are often suspicious of Beijing’s intentions. The Dalai Lama’s recent visit prompted soul-searching among Mongolian politicians, as the Vice Chairman of the Mongolian Parliament Tsend Nyamdorj, among others, publicly questioned the wisdom of taunting the dragon. But, like in the 1960s, Beijing’s heavy-handed threats make it politically difficult to defend closer ties with Beijing.

If China is ever to gain regional trust, it must convince others that its words about equality are more than just words, that it respects others’ right to dissenting opinions, and that it will not issue “strong demands” or apply an economic lever in an angry effort to force compliance. Zhou has long been a role model for Chinese diplomats. But they could learn a valuable lesson from the Dalai Lama. “The true hero,” he once said, “is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.”

“President Barack Obama on Thursday ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian suspected spies and imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies over their involvement in hacking U.S. political groups in the 2016 presidential election. The measures, taken during the last days of Obama’s presidency, mark a new post-Cold War low in U.S.-Russian ties and set up a potential flashpoint between incoming President-elect Donald Trump and fellow Republicans in Congress over how to deal with Moscow. Obama, a Democrat, had promised consequences after U.S. intelligence officials blamed Russia for hacks intended to influence the 2016 election. Officials pointed the finger directly at Russian President Vladimir Putin for personally directing the efforts and primarily targeting Democrats, who put pressure on Obama to respond.

Max Boot writes about fighting back against Putin “Putin’s tenure as Russia’s dictator has been dedicated to twin interlocking goals: to enhance his own power and wealth and that of the country he controls. The more powerful Russia becomes, after all, the more powerful its president becomes, too. In pursuit of more influence, Putin has tried to rebuild the Russian armed forces from a force of low-quality conscripts equipped with weapons that don’t work to a high-quality professional force with cutting-edge weapons. That transformation, only partially complete, has been shown off in Syria, which Putin has used as a showcase for systems including sleek Kalibr cruise missiles and the smoke-belching aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov. But as befits an old KGB man, Putin’s heart appears to lie more with “deniable” covert operations rather than with overt muscle-flexing.

Putin has become notorious for using “little green men” — Russian intelligence operatives and Spetsnaz (special forces) in civilian clothing — to infiltrate Ukrainian territory and start an uprising among the Russian-speaking population. And it worked: Russia annexed Crimea and has gained de facto control over much of eastern Ukraine. This tactic of undertaking barely disguised aggression has become known as “hybrid warfare,” and it has consistently left the West wrong-footed because Putin is careful to avoid crossing the normal red lines.

The West has been even more flummoxed by Putin’s campaign of political warfare designed to subvert anti-Russian regimes and replace them with more pliable leaders. The most high-profile manifestation of this effort was the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic targets in an attempt, as the CIA has now concluded, to swing the U.S. presidential election toward Donald Trump, the most pro-Russian politician in America since the heyday of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace. Russian internet trolls were also busy putting out anti-Clinton, pro-Trump stories, many of them demonstrably false.

Putin’s interference in the election was probably not the decisive factor (for that, blame FBI Director James Comey’s diligent efforts), but in an election decided by 100,000 votes in three states it is impossible to say what made a difference and what did not. Certainly Trump, who once called on Putin to hack his opponent, acts like a man with a guilty conscience, furiously denying not only that the hacks were designed to help him but that they were the work of the Kremlin at all. Putin will get his payoff if the new administration decides to lift the sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine — something that is more likely if ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, to whom Putin awarded an Order of Friendship, is confirmed as secretary of state.

Putin’s campaign of subversion and disinformation is hardly limited to the United States, however. It has been playing out across Europe for years, with Moscow supporting far-left and far-right parties that are united by their loathing for the European Union and NATO, the two institutions that Putin rightly sees as the chief impediments to his hopes of resurrecting the Russian Empire or at least a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

Russia has been most blatant in supporting France’s far-right National Front, which received an 11 million euro loan in 2014 from a Moscow-based bank and wants another 27 million euros to fight next year’s elections. The French presidential election in the spring is a can’t-lose proposition for Putin since both of the leading candidates — Marine Le Pen of the National Front and the mainstream conservative nominee, former Prime Minister François Fillon — favor closer ties with Moscow.

In Germany, Angela Merkel looks likely to win re-election and maintain a relatively hard line against the Kremlin, but WikiLeaks has just come out with a massive leak of German intelligence documents, many of them relating to controversial cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies. This is widely seen as a Russian attempt to undermine Merkel, as WikiLeaks has long been a favorite bulletin board for Russia’s intelligence services. In Montenegro, the Russians are accused of going even further in orchestrating a political campaign against the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Milo Dukanovic prior to the Oct. 16 election. When that didn’t work, the Russians apparently tried to launch a coup to overthrow the government, employing Serbian operatives with close ties to the Kremlin.

Little wonder that Alex Younger, the typically secretive head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, just gave an unusual speech warning that hostile powers such as Russia, which are utilizing “means as varied as cyberattacks, propaganda, or subversion of democratic process … represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty. They should be a concern to all those who share democratic values.” His words are echoed by Maj. Gen. Gunnar Karlson, the chief of Sweden’s main foreign intelligence agency, who warnsthat Russian subversion “is a serious threat because in different ways [the Russians] can push themselves into the very foundations of a democracy and influence democratic decision-making.” Russia is currently running a pressure campaign to dissuade Sweden, which is alarmed by growing Russian intrusions into its sovereign waters and airspace, from joining NATO.

It’s easy enough to decry Russian interference, but it’s hard to know what to do about it.

It’s easy enough to decry Russian interference, but it’s hard to know what to do about it. As a first step, it is imperative to document and expose Kremlin machinations, which is why it’s important to probe the hacking of the U.S. election. Congressional investigations, as called for by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, would be one possible approach, but the failed Benghazi committee shows the dangers of congressional grandstanding and partisanship. A better approach, because it would be more serious and nonpartisan, would be an independent commission modeled on the one that probed 9/11; it could be headed by former CIA Directors Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta.

But public exposure alone is not enough to make Putin cease and desist; indeed, documenting Russia’s schemes could actually enhance his aura of power by showing how cleverly he manipulates his adversaries. President Barack Obama has been shamefully derelict in making Putin pay a price for his aggression. Although his administration has threatened retaliation against Russia, he has not, insofar as we know, delivered. “We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official told the New York Times, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.” Among reasons for inaction, the Times cites the president’s “fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.” (As if Russia had any intention of cooperating with the United States in Syria!) His failure to more actively oppose Russian efforts during the campaign may have cost Hillary Clinton the election. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump, the beneficiary of Russia’s cyberattacks, doing much about it, but Obama still has a few weeks in office to act.

Possible responses can run the gamut from further sanctions — including financial and travel freezes on individuals responsible for the hacking — to retaliation in kind. Putin likes leaking Western emails. How would he like it if the National Security Agency leaked the communications between him and his cronies? Or if the U.S. intelligence community released details about his widely rumored overseas bank accounts? This could undermine his hold on power by puncturing his aura of self-righteousness and could even lead to asset freezes that would punish him in the pocketbook.

Beyond all of that, the West in general and the United States in particular will have to figure out how to wage political warfare on its own. That is something that we did in the early days of the Cold War when the CIA was busy helping anti-communists win elections around the world from Italy to the Philippines — and funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Encountermagazine, and other organizations to win the battle for “hearts and minds.” Today, Russia, Iran, China, and other closed societies are potentially vulnerable to a campaign designed to empower dissidents, discredit the ruling elite, and help ordinary people get accurate and uncensored news.

Putin suspects the United States of waging just such a campaign against himself and his allies; he holds the CIA responsible for the 2005 and 2014 uprisings in Ukraine that defeated pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych and the 2003 uprising in Georgia, which brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power. The irony is that, beyond the overt and benign democracy promotion efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington has done little to undermine anti-Western leaders or to promote pro-Western alternatives.

It is high time for that to change. The United States needs to revive the political warfare skills it once possessed and that have since atrophied, as Michael Doran and I argued in a 2013 Policy Innovation Memorandum for the Council on Foreign Relations. Putin has shown himself to be a master of this game; other adversaries, including Iran and the Islamic State, also actively wage political warfare. We don’t have the luxury of saying that it’s beneath us to play that game. Nothing less than the future of democracy is at stake.

“President Obama said on Thursday that the United States would retaliate for Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential election, asserting that “we need to take action,” and “we will.” The comments, in an interview with NPR, indicate that Mr. Obama, in his remaining weeks in office, will pursue either economic sanctions against Russia or perhaps some kind of response in cyberspace. Mr. Obama spoke as President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday again refused to accept Moscow’s culpability, asking on Twitter why the administration had waited “so long to act” if Russia “or some other entity” had carried out cyberattacks. The president discussed the potential for American retaliation with Steve Inskeep of NPR for an interview to air on Friday morning. “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our election,” Mr. Obama said, “we need to take action. And we will — at the time and place of our choosing.”

A piece discusses the next china ambassador “Friendship’” is everywhere in China, at least when it comes to dealing with foreigners. International societies are friendship associations. The stores once accessible only to foreign currency holders were called Friendship Stores. Provincial cities court friendly partners abroad. Peace Corps staff, after being slammed too often in Maoist propaganda to make the name palatable, were rebranded as “U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers” when they were finally let into the country. The highest honor bestowed on foreigners is the Friendship Award.

That might make it seem as if “friendship” actually matters. Take the case of Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, whom U.S. President-elect Donald Trump plans to tap as the next U.S. Ambassador to China. Branstad is supposedly an “old friend” of Chinese President Xi Jinping, a relationship built up on the back of agricultural visits when both were provincial and state-level officials. Branstad doesn’t speak much Chinese, and Xi doesn’t speak much English, and yet the sweet nothings exchanged via interpreter have evidently been enough to forge a relationship, the two perhaps joined by a shared love of corn.

It hopefully goes without saying that people in China are eminently capable of warm and enduring personal friendships. But in the context of international diplomacy, the distinct creature of an official “friendship” is a Band-Aid at best, and proves awfully fleeting as soon as realpolitik intervenes.

The People’s Republic of China’s first official “friendship” was with the Soviet Union, until it ended in mutual denunciations and blood on the ice.

The People’s Republic of China’s first official “friendship” was with the Soviet Union, until it ended in mutual denunciations and blood on the ice.China’s grizzly 1979 invasion of Vietnam started through the Friendship Pass. In 2012, a police guard had to be put on Beijing’s large Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital lest it be attacked by anti-Japanese mobs furious about the squabble over the Diaoyu Islands.

Claimed personal friendship in service of a diplomatic or business objective is even more meaningless. The average Chinese official will refer to someone as an “old friend” after the second meeting. Meanwhile, supposed experts in dealing with China often point to the importance of relationship, or guanxi, for doing business. But actual guanxi, which can often bind Chinese officials together in a code of silence,is built up through a mixture of shared backgrounds, favor-trading, masculine bonding, and, sometimes, mutual blackmail. Branstad and Xi don’t have that; they have never gone to the same school or served on the same Party Committee as young men, they aren’t somehow related by marriage, and it’s safe to assume they’ve never split a bribe. Those are the real markers of trust in China, not glad-handing at occasional conferences.

It’s better to think of friendship as merely a necessary but not sufficient precondition to getting things done in China. In order to receive a regulatory approval, close a deal, or ink a new diplomatic initiative, counter-parties must in the first instance have a baseline of civilized rapport. Then again, in what country is that not the case? It’s hard to imagine any of those things happening anywhere against a backdrop of open hostility.

More dangerously, because friendshiphas such a fuzzy meaning, anyone can proclaim to have it. More often, declarations that one has or is busy building the stuff can be used to paper over a failing venture, or underlying inadequacies in one’s country-specific knowledge. A foundering negotiation process can be explained away as relationship-building. A resident expat or firm can boast vaguely of in-country ties, whatever the reality. And local hucksters can bamboozle unwary foreigners by trading on connections they may not actually have.

Ultimately, the precondition to successful business and diplomacy in China is exactly what it’s always been: the alignment of concrete interests.

Ultimately, the precondition to successful business and diplomacy in China is exactly what it’s always been: the alignment of concrete interests. A visitor to the megacity of Chongqing representing a U.S. “friendship city” once complained of being unable to get a single meeting there. As a participant in the U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers program, one author of this article was repeatedly reminded that it should have been called the “China-U.S. Friendship Volunteers program,” with the host country first. When the United States was forging diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China, even Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai’s oft-cited bonhomie would have meant nothing without a shared desire to stick it to the Soviet Union.

Xi, of course, is in a position to do as he pleases to help his actual friends. But none of his actions so far have indicated any particular inclination toward the United States. In fact, when interests diverge, longstanding friendships can be quickly forgotten.After all, Xi stayed in Iowa in 1985, and more recently sent his daughter to Harvard College; none of that has stopped him from warning repeatedly of the poisonous influence of Western culture and thought, or overseeing a massive island-building spree in the South China Sea under the nose of the U.S. Navy.

None of this is Branstad’s fault. Some familiarity with Xi is better than none; Branstad is a solid and conventional choice, which may provide a small measure of predictability and comfort to Beijing, not to mention the American business community in China. But when it comes to a host of thorny issues in the bilateral relationship, Donald Trump will call the shots. If Xi and the Politburo feel that China’s interests are being threatened, or that accommodation with the United States is a political risk, then all the friendship in the world won’t mean a thing.

“China defended its right on Thursday to put “necessary military installations” on artificial islands in the South China Sea, after a U.S. think-tank said Beijing appeared to have deployed weapons such as anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said its findings, made available first to Reuters on Wednesday, were based on analysis of satellite images of islands in the strategic trade route, where territory is claimed by several countries. The United States has previously criticized what it called China’s militarization of its maritime outposts, and stressed the need for freedom of navigation by conducting periodic air and naval patrols near them that have angered Beijing. China’s Defence Ministry said in a statement on its website on Thursday that the construction it had carried out on islands and reefs in the disputed Spratlys chain was “mainly for civilian use”. “As for necessary military installations, they are mainly for defence and self-protection and are legitimate and lawful,” it said. “If someone makes a show of force at your front door, would you not ready your slingshot?” The United States has conducted four freedom of navigation patrols, seen as a challenge to China’s extensive territorial claims in the South China Sea, in the past year or so, most recently in October”.

Rosa Brooks makes the interesting point that America is not a democracy “Donald Trump will not destroy American democracy. True, America’s most loathsome presidential candidate said some typically loathsome things during Wednesday night’s presidential debate. Most notably, when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would “accept the result of this election,” Trump launched into a fuming denunciation of the news media and repeated his claim that the election is “rigged.” Pressed by Wallace on whether he accepts the principle that American elections should lead to a concession by the loser and a peaceful transition of power, Trump doubled down: “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”

Trump sure knows how to push people’s buttons. On cue, the global media moved into hysteria mode: “Donald Trump placed an unprecedented question mark over the peaceful succession of power in the United States last night,” spluttered the Times of London. In Germany, Der Spiegel decried Trump’s “shocking refusal” to recognize the election results. In the United States, every major newspaper denounced Trump’s comment: It was “a remarkable statement that seemed to cast doubt on American democracy,” opined the New York Times, while the Washington Post called it a “breathtaking repudiation of American democracy.”

But the only shocking thing about Trump’s statements is that everyone seems to find them so shocking.

It’s no surprise that Trump is shaping up to be a sore loser. He’s been one all his life.

It’s no surprise that Trump is shaping up to be a sore loser. He’s been one all his life. As Hillary Clinton pointed out during the debate, Trump even complained that TV’s Emmy Awards were rigged against “The Apprentice,” the reality show Trump hosted before moving on to the “The Presidential Campaign,” his latest absurdist television drama. (The Television Academy, which bestows the Emmys, begs to differ).

Yes, Trump’s ugly comments smack of fascism. Again, no surprise: This is the guy who wants to make all American Muslims register with the government so they can be more effectively monitored. This is the guy who wants to bring back torture and bomb the children of suspected terrorists. This is the guy who threatened, during the second debate, to send Clinton to prison if he wins.

Fortunately for the world, Trump isn’t the arbiter of election validity. If Clinton wins on Nov. 8, as now appears overwhelmingly likely, the courts, the police, the military, Congress, every federal agency, and the vast majority of American voters will accept her as the nation’s president. Trump can reject the election results if he wants, just as he can reject the notion that the Earth is round if he wants. It doesn’t matter. He can stand on a soapbox and whine, but the Secret Service won’t be letting him move into the White House on Jan. 20, and no one will be handing him the nuclear codes.

That’s not the only reason Trump’s unhinged debate comments don’t present an “unprecedented threat” to American democracy. Yes, they may incite some of his most disgruntled supporters to violence. But here again, this would hardly be new.

American history is replete with examples of voter intimidation and political and electoral violence. In 1834, opponents of abolition rioted in New York. In 1856, riots broke out in Baltimore over the disputed mayoral election of Thomas Swann, the “Know Nothing” candidate. In 1871, as many as 30 blacks were killed in Meridian, Mississippi, and the mayor was forcibly driven from office by a white mob. In November 1898, a violent coup by local white supremacists overthrew the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina. In November 1920, local whites became so incensed when a black man tried to vote that they massacred up to 50 black residents of Ocoee, Florida. 1968 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and violent clashes between Chicago police and protesters during the Democratic National Convention.

And, of course, there was the most violent political protest of all, also known as the Civil War. When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, most Southern states seceded from the Union. By the end of the war in 1865, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were dead.

That’s not an exhaustive list of political and electoral violence in America, just a representative one. If angry Trump supporters take to the streets — or beat up minorities, or grope some more women — it will be despicable. But it won’t be unprecedented. America has seen much, much worse, and the republic has not collapsed.

So don’t panic. Trump won’t undermine American democracy, both because we have a strong rule-of-law culture and because we’ve survived far more serious threats.

But don’t get too smug, either. There’s another reason Trump can’t do much to undermine American democracy, and it’s a dirty little secret: America isn’t really a democracy anyway.

If democracy implies that each person’s vote should count equally, the United States has never had much of a democracy.

If democracy implies that each person’s vote should count equally, the United States has never had much of a democracy. The Constitution created a greatly diluted form of representative democracy that privileges some voters over others. (And I’m not even referring to slavery, or early restriction of the franchise to white male property holders.) Every state gets two senators, for instance, regardless of population size. Since states with smaller populations have, in recent decades, also had less diverse populations, this gives outsized political power to rural white voters and dilutes the political impact of the demographic changes that have been so evident in urban America.

Meanwhile, the Electoral College further distorts democracy: A candidate can lose the popular vote but still win the presidency. Most recently, more Americans voted for Democratic candidate Al Gore than for Republican candidate George W. Bush in 2000, but thanks to the Electoral College system (and a little assist from the conservative justices on the Supreme Court), Bush became America’s 43rd president.

Toss in racial gerrymandering, interest group politics, campaign finance rules that give disproportionate political clout to the rich, and a bizarre and often discriminatory patchwork of state voter registration rules, and what you end up with is modern America: an oligarchy in which almost half of eligible voters don’t even bother to go to the polls.

That’s the final reason Trump can’t do much to undermine American democracy. It’s already been undermined.

“An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack. The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later”.

A piece notes the problems of globalisation “votes for Brexit in the United Kingdom and for Donald Trump in the United States have confounded foreign-policy commentators the world over. How could the world’s two great Anglo-Saxon democracies, for centuries the leaders and advocates of a global, rules-based international trade regime, now be leading a path toward isolationism and mercantilism?

In the aftermath of a shock, we tend to rationalize that it is a result of contingent factors, the absence of which would leave the world as we imagined it to be. Perhaps the relationship between Britain and the European Union was always contentious. Perhaps the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis left an unusually large pool of underemployed working-class voters, seeking to lash out against the establishment. A few years sooner, a few years later, and it would all be different.

Yet public opinion data proves the earthquakes of Brexit and Trump are not simply the result of chance or bad timing. Instead, they are the outcome of deepening fissures in the long-running project of globalization. Over several decades, that project has produced significant shifts in public opinion around the world, including ascendant national pride, antipathy to migrants, and growing skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international institutions. Those were tremors warning of a revolt against globalization. It is a revolt that has already defined politics in countries as far apart as Russia, Venezuela, and the Philippines, and it has now reached the established democracies of the West in the form of Brexit and Trump.

The resilience of national identity

First, one of the paradoxes of globalization has been that, as cross-border travel, migration, and trade have increased, attachment to national identity has not weakened, but instead grown stronger. Since 1981 the European and World Values Surveys have asked respondents whether they feel “very proud,” “quite proud,” “not very proud,” or “not at all proud” of their national identity (see chart below). That recent decades have seen an upsurge in national attachment in authoritarian regimes such as Russia or China is unsurprising, yet less noted is a return of national pride in societies that were once thought of “post-national,” such as Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. This surge in national pride has been concurrent with the growth of “new right” political parties, such as the Sweden Democrats (SD), the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands.

National pride need not take the form of chauvinism or nationalism, and yet, these remain its inherent risks. Pride entails a need for recognition, and a feeling that one’s achievements or way of life are worthy of special value, promotion, and protection. A proud public is easier for political elites to manipulate by instrumentalizing external conflicts, or blaming scapegoats within: “take back control,” and “restore our country” are the universal slogans of populist parties and movements.

Hostility toward immigrants

Second, as scholars such as Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel have documented, over the past thirty years, Western societies have become more tolerant in a remarkable variety of ways, including toward homosexual marriage, abortion, divorce, and the use of soft drugs. And yet, while such “lifestyle tolerance” has risen markedly across Western countries, “identity tolerance” — tolerance of peoples with different ethnic or religious backgrounds — has moved in the opposite direction. In particular, hostile sentiment towards immigrants has increased steadily decade by decade since the 1980s.

The conjunction of rising lifestyle tolerance with growing intolerance of migrants may appear, at first, contradictory: Should tolerance not extend to all groups and minorities? Yet it has opened the space for a socially libertarian platform within the radical right, defining itself as the defender of a “national way of life” against newcomers who do not share the West’s liberal values. Pim Fortuyn, the openly homosexual Dutch politician who combined a flamboyant social liberalism with unabashed Islamophobia, was the first far-right politician to occupy this ideological space. Yet the same rhetorical strategy has become a cornerstone of Geert Wilders’s PVV in the Netherlands, of Israeli secular nationalists, of the big-tent National Front (FN) of Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump’s libertarian supporters, such as Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos. If the true clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, as Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris suggested in these pages, is over social liberties, then the globalization of media and peoples has turned this clash from an international to a domestic one, and one that is reshaping the party systems of major Western democracies. That may be one reason why Western political systems are now following the precedent set by Israel in the early 2000s, in which the collapse of the cosmopolitan center-left in the form of the Labor Party ceded place to a resurgent secular ethnic nationalism led by Likud, Kadima, and Yisrael Beiteinu.

Loss of faith in international institutions

As national identity has grown and resentment of international migrants increased, there has been a corresponding loss of faith in the value and purpose of international organizations, including the European Union, United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the so-called Bretton Woods institutions. That is most evident in Europe, where since 1990, the European Values Study has asked respondents in Europe their degree of confidence in the European Community, and since 1995, the European Union.

Already in the 1990s, skepticism about the European Union was growing among the publics of major EU member states. While the launch of the euro and the founding of the European Constitutional Convention at the start of the new century may have felt like an apogee for the European project, already by this point a majority of respondents in major EU member states felt distrust in European institutions. Further efforts at European integration have been forced against the will of European publics, as evinced from the Dutch and French votes against the European Constitution in 2005, or the Irish rejection of the Nice Treaty in 2001 and the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. The vote for Brexit in 2016 shows the inherent limits in elite-led integration — and the project of global governance more generally.

How did we get here?

Why have citizens across Western democracies become increasingly nationalistic, opposed to mass migration, and suspicious of international institutions? One answer is that this is a consequence of the financial crisis, which has left deep pockets of economic deprivation and underemployment. But that answer is clearly wrong, because these trends have been in place for the better part of 30 years. A more accurate answer would be that they reflect an inherent tension between national democratic sovereignty and elite-led efforts at global integration, and that this tension has now reached its breaking point.

As economies and societies around the globe become more and more interconnected and bound within transnational rules and institutions, the range of policy options available to domestic policymakers has declined. Such constraints range from formal rules, such as the acceptance of the free movement of peoples within the European Union, or the asylum obligations that are outlined under the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, or the limits on deficits stipulated in European Union’s Stability and Growth Pact and the implicit economic constraints imposed by global financial and investment flows. Thus, on issue after issue, from corporate taxation, to control over immigration, to fiscal and monetary policy, national elites frequently find themselves unable to deliver policies consistent with public preferences. Instead they have blamed international institutions for their inability to take actions that they privately do not condone. In this way, politicians feel obliged, in the words of Hillary Clinton, to maintain “both a public and a private position.”

Yet the constraints on national sovereignty entailed by global markets and institutions has weakened the mechanisms that once translated popular views into public policy, leading to a “democratic deficit”’ that has left citizens increasingly frustrated with democratic politics, and increasingly with the democratic system itself. At the same time, the institutions of “global governance” have failed not only to provide avenues for popular participation, but also to deliver outcomes that such participation would be liable to generate, such as compensation for the losers from global trade, or protection of the identities and ways of life of local and national communities. In the words of Larry Summers, one of global integration’s advocates, it is a project “carried out by elites, for elites, with little consideration for the interests of ordinary people.”

This frustration has set up a dangerous dynamic, the consequences of which are now only too visible. In many countries, the only viable challenge to an increasingly homogeneous set of decision-makers comes from political parties or movements established by outsiders, such as the tea party movement and now Donald Trump in the United States, or populist parties of the right and left in Europe. These movements explicitly set themselves against a metropolitan and cosmopolitan elite which, they claim — not always without reason — routinely ignores popular demands and policy preferences. As the differences between establishment parties on the left and right have dwindled in many countries, the only way for voters to effect a change in policy has been to rally to parties that reject many of the traditional rules of the democratic game. In this way, as politicians’ responsiveness to citizens has decreased, citizens have been encouraged to turn away from democracy.

Where will this lead? History’s answers are not encouraging. In the runup to World War I, it was widely believed that a new liberal order had been constructed under the aegis of the British, French, and Habsburg empires, yet this world was thrown into utter disarray by the upheavals of war and the Great Depression. Far from eroding the nation-state, the era of elite-led global integration in the years after 1989 has similarly failed to create legitimate transnational institutions, leaving national democratic communities as the primary source of identity, security, and loyalty for citizens. Now that the defenders of the traditional nation-state are regaining the power they have coveted for so long, the future of global governance rests in their hands. At stake is whether they succeed in finding a new balance between national sovereignty and transnational cooperation — or instead, return us to an era of mercantilism, inter-state competition, and great-power warfare.

Simon Henderson writes that Yemen should be separated, “should Americans care about Yemen? Average Americans probably couldn’t find this remote southwestern corner of Arabia on a map. But it’s time for them to learn. Yemen’s civil war concerns Americans because their close but often awkward ally, Saudi Arabia, has persuaded them to take part in it — and, alongside that brutal war, there’s another that the United States initiated and has no intention of ending anytime soon.

How can the United States ensure the former, Saudi Arabia’s war of choice, doesn’t interfere with the latter? The answer could be to follow the 1953 deathbed advice of King Abdul Aziz, known as Ibn Saud, who supposedly said, “Never let Yemen be united.” Yemen is a problem that probably won’t be solved until it is dissolved.

Paranoia has long been the basis of Saudi policymaking on Yemen. It used to be paranoia about the Yemenis themselves; now it’s about Iranians. Yemen’s Houthi rebels are variously “Iranian-supported,” “Iranian-backed,” or “Iranian-influenced.” The last is my preferred description since it clarifies that, while they model themselves after Lebanon’s Hezbollah and have adopted the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” they ultimately want to be masters of their own fates more than Iranian surrogates. (And as members of the Zaidi sect they are only Shiite-like rather than actual Shiites.)

It’s clear the Houthis are a direct threat to the internationally recognized (and Saudi-allied) Yemeni government of President Abdu Rabbo Mansour Hadi, whom they forced to flee the country after joining forces with former Yemeni President and longtime Saudi nemesis Ali Abdullah Saleh (who used to oppose the Houthis until he was forced from power in 2012). But there is good reason to doubt these rebels pose a direct threat to Riyadh, outside the confines of Saudi paranoia.

Nonetheless, as an apparent quid pro quo for tolerating Washington’s nuclear rapprochement with Tehran, Riyadh has demanded U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition fighting to re-establish in Sanaa the rule of Hadi. (Hadi, for the present moment, prefers the greater security of a Riyadh hotel suite.) There’s an additional factor, which makes the favors run 2-to-1 in Riyadh’s direction: Washington wants Saudi involvement and a stamp of approval for the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Fear, if not quite paranoia, could also describe official Washington’s attitude toward Yemen.

Fear, if not quite paranoia, could also describe official Washington’s attitude toward Yemen. Its rocky hillsides have been the training areas for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which helped prepare the 2009 Northwest Airlines “underwear” bomber and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. A terrorist incident in the United States with a Yemeni address on it is a realistic possibility, and the American officials who know it are prepared to go very far to prevent it from being realized. A successful attack on a U.S. Navy ship similar to the suicide speedboat that crippled the USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, they feel, would be almost as bad.

Until war broke out with the Houthis last year, U.S. Special Forces operated out of the Anad Air Base just north of Aden, playing whack-a-mole against jihadis, with occasionally more significant successes, such as the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the fiery preacher (and U.S. citizen), by a Hellfire missile in 2011. Now U.S. operations are conducted from Djibouti, on the other side of the Red Sea, in Africa. As before, drones are a major part of the effort. There are also, semi-clandestinely, several dozen U.S. special operations forces on the ground.

There’s a crucial difference in Saudi and U.S. interests that quickly becomes apparent. Whereas Riyadh’s thinking is dominated by Iran’s support for the Houthi rebels who control the capital and much of what was once North Yemen (or, more formally, the Yemen Arab Republic), Washington’s anxieties focus on the south, the territory once known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. (The modern state we call Yemen was only formed when those two countries unified in 1992.)

The southern expanse of Yemen from the Bab el-Mandeb strait to the border with Oman has technically been liberated by the Saudi-led Arab coalition. In reality, forces of the United Arab Emirates did most of the heavy lifting and now, with residual government forces, have control over the port city (and old capital) of Aden as well as Mukalla farther east. But AQAP continues to find sanctuary in the large stretches of the south where the Yemeni government, and its Arab allies, struggles to maintain control. Fighters claiming allegiance to the Islamic State are also active there.

Washington’s and Riyadh’s separate wars are bound together in a manner not necessarily obvious to outsiders.

Washington’s and Riyadh’s separate wars are bound together in a manner not necessarily obvious to outsiders. The Royal Saudi Air Force and the U.S. Air Force are sharing Yemen’s airspace and adjoining, even overlapping, battle space. The two countries have to cooperate and therefore largely tolerate the behavior of the other party.

But that tolerance is under strain. Even before the horrendous Oct. 8 bombing of a funeral gathering in Sanaa in which more than 140 were killed and several hundred injured, U.S. concern for Saudi tactics had meant reduced levels of cooperation. Inflight refueling was curtailed, meaning that Saudi F-15s could not loiter in Yemeni airspace, waiting for targets to present themselves. And cooperation was reduced on “targeting” — the curious technical word meaning what size of bomb to drop, from what height, from what direction, and even at what time of day, the latter so as to reduce “collateral damage” or, more accurately, civilian casualties. The Saudis had already been targeting clinics and schools and the justification — that the Houthis were placing military stores and headquarters in or close to them — was wearing thin.

The bombing of a funeral two weeks ago was both a humanitarian catastrophe and a major tactical disaster for the overall strategy of the anti-Houthi war. Even though the target was a Yemeni politician allied to the Houthis, bombing such a gathering was contrary to the ethics of the U.S. military. The Saudis only admitted to “coalition aircraft” being involved, a phrasing that suggests the unfortunate reality that they were American-supplied F-15s, carrying American-made munitions. Washington’s power centers — the White House, Congress, and the media — screamed in horror. The blame was spun onto overexcited anti-Houthi agents in Sanaa and the fact that the target was approved at only a low level in the military hierarchy.

The awfulness of the wake-cum-mass-explosive-cremation was overtaken in the news cycle only when the Houthis responded by launching two, perhaps three, unsuccessful missile attacks on the destroyer USS Mason in the Red Sea north of the Bab-el-Mandeb. The United States retaliated by launching Harpoon missile strikes, which pulverized Houthi coastal radar facilities but caused zero collateral damage.

A three-day cease-fire is supposed to come into effect to give a chance for diplomacy by United Nations envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed of Mauritania. Largely dependent on food imports, Yemen is on the cusp of a humanitarian crisis. It is probably too much to expect the Houthis and their supporters to lay down their arms. Previous cease-fires have collapsed after Saudi Arabia detected alleged infringements and re-launched airstrikes. This cease-fire can theoretically be renewed; it is an open question whether it will be.

The U.S. strategy should be to maintain a cease-fire that could be brokered into a power-sharing arrangement in the north.

The U.S. strategy should be to maintain a cease-fire that could be brokered into a power-sharing arrangement in the north. Hadi, Washington’s and Saudi Arabia’s man, technically controls from his Riyadh hotel suite the majority of Yemen territory. Unfortunately that land is the empty part of Yemen, with perhaps a population of only 3 million. The Houthi-Saleh alliance controls much less of the ground, but the mountainous part is militarily defensible. Additionally, this territory is home to more than 20 million people, the bulk of the country’s population.

The partition of Yemen, a return to Ibn Saud’s deathbed wish, should have a clear logic for all sides. The south wants it. Hadi himself may prefer it. The crucial local foreign power in the south, the UAE, is also said to think it is the best option. Distracted by its involvements elsewhere, Iran may not oppose it. It may depend on whether Saudi Arabia and, more particularly, its defense minister and deputy crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, can be convinced of the wisdom of his grandfather’s deathbed words.

Barring another outrage in Yemen with civilian casualties or a terrorist attack in the United States, Washington’s efforts over the next few months of political transition at home are likely to be limited. But the problem of Yemen, or of the two Yemens, will be waiting for the next U.S. president.

“The United States is ready to confront China should it continue its overreaching maritime claims in the South China Sea, the head of the U.S. Pacific fleet said on Wednesday, comments that threaten to escalate tensions between the two global rivals. China claims most of the resource-rich South China Sea through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. Neighbours Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims. The United States has called on China to respect the findings of the arbitration court in The Hague earlier this year which invalidated its vast territorial claims in the strategic waterway. But Beijing continues to act in an “aggressive” manner, to which the United States stands ready to respond, Admiral Harry Harris, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, said in a speech in Sydney”.

A piece from Crux discusses the recent talk of Pope Francis to the Roman Curia, “In his annual speech to the Roman Curia on Thursday, Pope Francis presented a sweeping vision of reform for the Vatican’s central administration, outlining the values he wants that reform to embody and insisting that old bureaucratic patterns such as “promoting to remove” must come to an end. Pulling no punches, Francis also conceded his efforts at reform have attracted opposition – both “open resistance,” offered in a spirit of constructive dialogue, and “hidden” and “malicious” resistance, which he said “sprouts in distorted minds and shows itself when the devil inspires bad intentions, often wrapped in sheep’s clothing.”

Yet even resistance for bad motives, he said, “is necessary and merits being heard, listened to and encouraged to express itself.”

Francis denounced an attitude toward reform in the model of Gattopardismo, a reference to a classic Italian novel, the most famous line from which is, “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”

The pontiff called for more lay people and more women to be included in the Vatican’s workforce, and also said he wants to see Vatican departments become increasingly “multi-cultural.”

Francis hinted that more Vatican departments will be either consolidated or eliminated before the reform is over, and suggested that additional personnel changes are also in the cards.

The pope spoke Thursday in the Vatican’s Sala Clementina to the cardinals and other senior church official who make up the Vatican’s power structure, reminding them of reform moves that have been taken so far, such as the creation of two new super-departments for Family, Laity and Life and for Service of Integral Human Development, which bring several previously independent offices under the same roof.

Francis insisted that the reform process he’s been leading since his election in March 2013 isn’t merely cosmetic, or a simple “facelift” intended to smooth out a few wrinkles on the Roman Curia’s face, but rather a work of both administrative and spiritual purification.

“Dear brothers, it isn’t the wrinkles in the Church we have to be afraid of, but the stains!” he said.

The pontiff told the cardinals and other movers and shakers that no reform will succeed without an element of personal conversion, while bluntly saying that personnel changes in senior positions “without doubt happen, and will happen.”

The pontiff then outlined twelve values he believes should guide Vatican reform.

Individuality: “I again reemphasize that without individual conversion, all the changes in structures will be useless,” he said. “A healthy body is one which knows how to recuperate, welcome, strengthen, take care of and make holy its members.”

Being Pastoral: Francis insisted that members of the Roman Curia must have a strong pastoral instinct, beginning with the people they encounter every day, and that no one should feel “overlooked or mistreated.” The work of the Roman Curia, he said, must be driven by a spirit of “service and communion.”

A Sense of Mission: The ultimate end of every work of the Church, Francis said, must be to carry the Gospel “to the ends of the earth.”

Rationality: Francis insisted that there must be a rational division of labor within the Curia, that every department must have clearly defined responsibilities, and that “no discastery can attribute to itself the competence of another.”

Functionality: Combining several smaller offices into one, the pope said, strengthens their ability to perform their functions and also gives them a “greater relevance,” including in terms of external perceptions.

Modernization: Offices of the Roman Curia, the pope said, must be able to “read the signs of the times,” in the language of the Second Vatican Council, and update their operations and personnel accordingly.

Sobriety: The pontiff said a “simplification and streamlining” of the Curia is necessary, putting some offices together and eliminating redundant functions within offices. He suggested that some “commissions, academies, committees” and the like may yet be suppressed altogether.

Subsidiarity: Francis suggested that the specific responsibilities of various offices may be retooled to make their competence clear, in order to promote “autonomy, coordination and subsidiarity.” Within that horizon, he confirmed the traditional role of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State as “the most direct and immediate help to the pope.”

Synodality: The pope called for a more collaborative spirit among the various Vatican offices, including regular meetings of department heads, presided over by the pope. He also said that as the number of offices is reduced, it will make regular meetings for the heads of those offices with the pope more possible. Francis insisted that Vatican offices not become “fragmented” and “self-referential.”

Catholicity: The pope called for Vatican departments to seek personnel from all over the world, including permanent deacons and laity, especially women, and that the Vatican’s workforce must be “multicultural.”

Professionalism: Francis urged ongoing formation for Vatican personnel in their areas of professional responsibility, and also demanded a complete end to the time-honored practice of “promoting to remove.” (The Latin phrase is promoveatur ut amoveatur.)

Gradualism: Francis said reform involves discernment, including a period of “steps, testing, corrections, experiments, and temporary approvals” of changes. “It’s not a matter of indecisiveness but the necessary flexibility to reach a real reform.”

The pontiff then ticked off a series of reform steps that have already been taken, including an overhaul of the Vatican’s financial structures, the creation of a new Secretariat for Communications, the two other new dicasteries recently formed, an overhaul of the Church’s annulment process, and more.

In 2014, Pope Francis denounced 15 “spiritual ailments” Vatican bureaucrats suffered in his address to the Roman Curia. Last year he listed the “catalog of virtues” they should show.

The speech to the Roman Curia is traditionally regarded as the informal beginning of the holiday season for the pontiff, which is generally regarded as closing on Jan. 6 with the feast of the Epiphany. On Saturday Francis will preside over Christmas eve celebrations in the Vatican, followed by his noontime “Urbi et Orbe” blessing on Christmas day at noon Rome time.

“The leaders of France and Germany, speaking two days before an EU summit which will discuss the conflict in eastern Ukraine, said they want to extend sanctions against Russia due to a lack of progress in implementing a ceasefire deal. The conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists has claimed nearly 10,000 lives since it erupted in 2014. Germany and France have tried to convince both sides to implement a peace deal agreed in Minsk last year but with little success so far. EU leaders will on Thursday discuss extending sanctions, which include restricting access to international financing and curbs on defence and energy cooperation with Russia. Merkel, speaking with Hollande who was visiting a Franco-German conference on the digital economy in Berlin, said implementation of the ceasefire deal was “very sluggish”. “It will be necessary to extend the sanctions against Russia again – although we would have wished for better progress in the implementation of this process,” she said.

An article from Foreign Affairs discusses populism and its relationship to facism, “right-wing movements have mounted increasingly strong challenges to political establishments across Europe and North America, many commentators have drawn parallels to the rise of fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. Last year, a French court ruled that opponents of Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, had the right to call her a “fascist”—a right they have frequently exercised. This May, after Norbert Hofer, the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, nearly won that country’s presidential election, The Guardian asked, “How can so many Austrians flirt with this barely disguised fascism?” And in an article that same month about the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican U.S. presidential candidate, the conservative columnist Robert Kagan warned, “This is how fascism comes to America.” “Fascist” has served as a generic term of political abuse for many decades, but for the first time in ages, mainstream observers are using it seriously to describe major politicians and parties.

Fascism is associated most closely with Europe between the world wars, when movements bearing this name took power in Italy and Germany and wreaked havoc in many other European countries. Although fascists differed from country to country, they shared a virulent opposition to democracy and liberalism, as well as a deep suspicion of capitalism. They also believed that the nation—often defined in religious or racial terms—represented the most important source of identity for all true citizens. And so they promised a revolution that would replace liberal democracy with a new type of political order devoted to nurturing a unified and purified nation under the guidance of a powerful leader.

Although today’s right-wing populists share some similarities with the interwar fascists, the differences are more significant. And more important, what today’s comparisons often fail to explain is how noxious politicians and parties grow into the type of revolutionary movements capable of fundamentally threatening democracy, as interwar fascism did. In order to understand this process, it is not nearly enough to examine the programs and appeal of right-wing extremist parties, the personalities of their politicians, or the inclinations of their supporters. Instead, one must carefully consider the broader political context. What turned fascists from marginal extremists into rulers of much of Europe was the failure of democratic elites and institutions to deal with the crises facing their societies during the interwar years. Despite real problems, the West today is confronting nowhere near the same type of breakdown it did in the 1930s. So calling Le Pen, Trump, and other right-wing populists “fascists” obscures more than it clarifies.

Like many of today’s right-wing movements, fascism originated during a period of intense globalization. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, capitalism dramatically reshaped Western societies, destroying traditional communities, professions, and cultural norms. This was also a time of immense immigration. Peasants from rural areas, which had been decimated by new agricultural technologies and the inflow of cheap agricultural products, flocked to cities, and the citizens of poorer countries flocked to richer ones in search of better lives.

Then, as now, these changes frightened and angered many people, creating fertile ground for new politicians who claimed to have the answers. Prominent among these politicians were right-wing nationalists, who vowed to protect citizens from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets. Fascist movements arose in almost all Western countries, from Argentina to Austria and from France to Finland. Fascists became disruptive forces in some countries and influenced policymaking in others, but they did not fundamentally challenge existing political orders before 1914. Their policies and appeal alone, in other words, did not make them truly dangerous or revolutionary. It would take World War I to do that.

That conflict killed, maimed, and traumatized millions of Europeans, and it physically and economically devastated much of the continent. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey remarked at the beginning of the war. And indeed, by the time the war was over, an entire way of life had vanished.

The year 1918 brought an end to the war, but not to the suffering. Europe’s continental empires—Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian—­collapsed during or after the conflict, creating a variety of new states that lacked any experience with democracy and featured mixed populations that had little interest in living together. Meanwhile, in many of Europe’s older states, such as Germany and Spain, old regimes also collapsed, making way for democratic transitions. But like the new states, most of these countries also lacked experience with popular rule—and thus the habits, norms, and institutions necessary for making it work.

To make matters worse, the end of the war, rather than ushering in a period of peace and reconstruction, brought with it an unending stream of social and economic problems. New democracies struggled to reintegrate millions of soldiers back into society and reconstruct economies that had been distorted and disrupted by the fighting. Austria and Germany had to respond to the humiliation of a lost war and a punitive peace, and both were hit with hyperinflation. Across the continent, lawlessness and violence quickly became endemic as democratic governments lost control of the streets and parts of their territories. Italy suffered through almost two years of factory occupations, peasant land seizures, and armed conflicts between left- and right-wing militias. In Germany, the Weimar Republic faced violent left- and right-wing uprisings, forcing the government to send in troops to recapture cities and regions.

Despite these and other problems, fascists at first remained marginal forces. In Italy, they received almost no votes in the country’s first postwar election. And in Germany, Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch flopped, ending with him and many of his coconspirators in jail. But as time passed, problems persisted. European economies had trouble getting back on their feet, and street brawls, assassinations, and other forms of social disorder continued to plague many European countries. By the late 1920s, in short, many Europeans’ faith in democracy had been badly shaken.

DEMOCRACIES IN CRISIS

Then came the Great Depression. What proved so catastrophic about that event was not the economic suffering it caused—although that was bad enough—but the failure of democratic institutions to respond to it. To understand the difference, compare the fates of Germany and the United States. These two countries were hit the hardest by the Depression, experiencing the highest levels of unemployment, rates of business collapse, and drops in production. But in Germany, the Weimar Republic then fell to the Nazi onslaught, whereas in the United States, democracy survived—despite the appearance of some pseudo-fascist leaders such as the Louisiana politician Huey Long and the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin. Why the different outcomes?

The answer lies in the two governments’ divergent responses to the economic crisis. German leaders did little to ease their society’s suffering; in fact, they pursued policies of austerity, which exacerbated the economic downturn in general and the horrifically high rates of unemployment in particular. Strikingly, even the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, sat meekly by, offering little in the way of an attractive alternative program. In the United States, meanwhile, democratic institutions and norms were longer lived and therefore more robust. But also critical to staving off fascism was President Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence that the government could and would help its citizens, by laying the foundations of the modern welfare state.

Unfortunately for Europe, too many governments there proved unable or unwilling to respond as actively, and most mainstream political parties offered little in the way of viable alternative plans. By the early 1930s, liberal parties had been discredited across much of the continent; their faith in markets, unwillingness to respond forcefully to capitalism’s downsides, and hostility to nationalism struck voters as completely out of synch with interwar realities. With the exception of Scandinavia’s, meanwhile, most socialist parties were also flummoxed, telling citizens that their lives would improve only once capitalism had fully collapsed—and that they could do little to help them in the interim. (Socialists were also indifferent or hostile to concerns about national identity and the evisceration of traditional norms—another politically unwise stance during a period of immense social upheaval.) Communists did at least put forth a compelling alternative to the status quo, but their appeal was limited by an almost exclusive focus on the working class and their hostility to nationalism.

And so in all too many European countries, it was the fascists who were able to take advantage of the declining faith in democracy that accompanied the Depression. Fascists offered both a strong critique of the reigning order and a powerful alternative to it. They criticized democracy as inefficient, unresponsive, and weak and promised to replace it altogether. The new system would use the state to protect citizens from capitalism’s most destructive effects by creating jobs, expanding the welfare state (for “true” citizens only, of course), eliminating supposedly exploitative capitalists (often Jews), and funneling resources instead to businesses that were deemed to serve the national interest. Fascists promised to end the divisions and conflicts that had weakened their nations—often, of course, by ridding them of those viewed as not truly part of them. And they pledged to restore a sense of pride and purpose to societies that had for too long felt battered by forces outside their control. These positions enabled fascism in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere to attract an extremely diverse constituency that cut across classes. Although fascist parties received disproportionately high support from men, the lower-middle class, and former soldiers, they enjoyed a broader base of support than any other type of party in interwar Europe.

Despite all these advantages, the fascists still lacked the strength to take power on their own; they also needed the connivance of traditional conservatives. These conservatives—who sought to preserve the power of the traditional elite and destroy that of the people—lacked mass constituencies of their own and believed they could use the fascists’ popularity to achieve their long-term goals. So they worked behind the scenes to maneuver Mussolini and Hitler into office, believing that they could later manipulate or get rid of these men. Little did they know that the fascists were playing the same game. Soon after being appointed chancellor, in 1933, Hitler did away with his erstwhile conservative allies, whom he correctly viewed as a hindrance to his long-planned revolutionary project. Mussolini, who had been appointed prime minister in 1922, took a little longer to completely secure his position—but he, too, eventually pushed aside (or simply killed) many of the traditional conservatives who had helped make him Il Duce in the first place.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

So what does all of this say about Le Pen, Trump, and today’s other right-wing extremists? They certainly share some similarities with the interwar fascists. Like their predecessors, today’s right-wing extremists denounce incumbent democratic leaders as inefficient, unresponsive, and weak. They promise to nurture their nation, protect it from its enemies, and restore a sense of purpose to people who feel battered by forces outside their control. And they pledge to stand up for “the people,” who are often defined in religious or racial terms.

But if the similarities are striking, the differences are even more so. Most obvious, today’s extremists claim they want not to bury democracy but to improve it. They critique the functioning of contemporary democracy but offer no alternative to it, just vague promises to make government stronger, more efficient, and more responsive.

Current right-wing extremists are thus better characterized as populist rather than fascist, since they claim to speak for everyday men and women against corrupt, debased, and out-of-touch elites and institutions. In other words, they are certainly antiliberal, but they are not antidemocratic. This distinction is not trivial. If today’s populists come to power—even the right-wing nationalists among them—the continued existence of democracy will permit their societies to opt for a do-over by later voting them out. Indeed, this may be democracy’s greatest strength: it allows countries to recover from their mistakes.

But the more important difference between today’s right-wing extremists and yesterday’s fascists is the larger context. As great as contemporary problems are, and as angry as many citizens may be, the West is simply not facing anything approaching the upheaval of the interwar period. “The mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would be always in revolt,” Leon Trotsky once wrote, and the same logic applies to the appearance of fascism. In the United States and western Europe, at least, democracy and democratic norms have deep roots, and contemporary governments have proved nowhere near as inept as their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, democratic procedures and institutions, welfare states, political parties, and robust civil societies continue to provide citizens with myriad ways of voicing their concerns, influencing political outcomes, and getting their needs met.

For these reasons, the right-wing extremists in the United States and western Europe today have much more limited options and opportunities than their interwar counterparts did. (On the other hand, in eastern and southern Europe, where democratic norms and institutions are younger and weaker, movements have emerged that resemble traditional fascism much more closely, including Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary.) As the scholar Theda Skocpol has stressed, revolutionary movements don’t create crises; they exploit them. In other words, true revolutionary threats to democracy emerge when democracies themselves create crises ready to be exploited by failing to deal with the challenges they face.

Things can change, of course, and the lack of true fascist movements in the United States and western Europe today is no excuse for complacency. But what the interwar period illustrates is that the West should worry more about the problems afflicting democracy than about right-wing populists themselves. The best way to ensure that the Le Pens and Trumps of the world go down in history as also-rans rather than as real threats is to make democratic institutions, parties, and politicians more responsive to the needs of all citizens. In the United States, for example, rising inequality, stagnating wages, deteriorating communities, congressional gridlock, and the flow of big money to campaigns have played a bigger role in fueling support for Trump than his purported charisma or the supposed authoritarian leanings of his supporters. Tackling those problems would no doubt help prevent the rise of the next Trump.

History also shows that conservatives should be particularly wary of embracing right-wing populists. Mainstream Republicans who make bogus claims about voter fraud, rigged elections, and the questionable patriotism and nationality of President Barack Obama in order to appeal to the extremist fringes are playing an extremely dangerous game, since such rhetoric fans citizens’ fear and distrust of their politicians and institutions, thus undermining their faith in democracy itself. And just like their interwar counter­parts, these conservatives are also likely enhancing the appeal of politicians who have little loyalty to the conservatives’ own policies, constituencies, or institutions.

Right-wing populism—indeed, populism of any kind—is a symptom of democracy in trouble; fascism and other revolutionary movements are the consequence of democracy in crisis. But if governments do not do more to address the many social and economic problems the United States and Europe currently face, if mainstream politicians and parties don’t do a better job reaching out to all citizens, and if conservatives continue to fan fear and turn a blind eye to extremism, then the West could quickly find itself moving from the former to the latter.

“Vietnam has begun dredging work on a disputed reef in the South China Sea, satellite imagery shows, the latest move by the Communist state to bolster its claims in the strategic waterway. Activity visible on Ladd Reef in the Spratly Islands could anger Hanoi’s main South China Sea rival, Beijing, which claims sovereignty over the group and most of the resource-rich sea. Ladd Reef, on the southwestern fringe of the Spratlys, is completely submerged at high tide but has a lighthouse and an outpost housing a small contingent of Vietnamese soldiers. The reef is also claimed by Taiwan. In an image taken on Nov. 30 and provided by U.S.-based satellite firm Planet Labs, several vessels can be seen in a newly dug channel between the lagoon and open sea. While the purpose of the activity cannot be determined for certain, analysts say similar dredging work has been the precursor to more extensive construction on other reefs. “We can see that, in this environment, Vietnam’s strategic mistrust is total … and they are rapidly improving their defences,” said Trevor Hollingsbee, a retired naval intelligence analyst with Britain’s defence ministry”.

An unusual article argues that better relations between America and Russia could lead to worse relations, “Some American presidents have foreign-policy doctrines. Others are inclined to trust their gut. For a very few, their gut is their foreign-policy doctrine. Donald Trump seems to belong to this latter and most rare type. He poses an extraordinary challenge to anyone attempting to imagine how visceral instincts and dispositions can be translated into actionable policies, for good or ill.

The most compelling, and perhaps the most urgent, such challenge concerns Russia. There is a facile assumption that détente and peaceful coexistence between the United States and Russia will now be in the offing. It is an assumption that urgently needs to be reassessed.

Distilling a coherent policy on Russian relations from president-elect Trump’s jumble of campaign catchphrases and provocative one-liners is no easy task— which is why a more reasonable starting place may be to consider Trump’s likely motives for lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin during the campaign, against the pleas of his advisors and running mate. Some America-watchers inside the Kremlin apparently consideredTrump’s eccentric pro-Russian pronouncements more as a business gambit than as a rudimentary foreign policy. Many Democrats, on the other hand, seem to assume that Trump’s deferential attitude toward the Russian president reflects undisclosed financial entanglements and perhaps even the Kremlin’s possession of reputation-blackening kompromat.

But Trump’s “cozying up to Putin,” to use Sen. John McCain’s derogatory phrase, is better understood as his way of soliciting support among disenchanted American voters. It helped him position himself as a rebel leader and frame the quadrennial election as a revolution-in-the-making. Above all, it dramatically illustrated his willingness to break radically with the entire Washington establishment, Republican as well as Democratic. To excite the loyalty of his politically alienated voters, he needed to communicate unequivocally that he would have nothing to do with the Washington insiders who had allegedly betrayed them. He did this by signaling his dissent from most of the central foreign-policy tenets of his own nominal party, including the premise that Russia is one of the country’s foremost national-security threats. It was Mitt Romney, after all, who, as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, labeled Russia as America’s geopolitical enemy No. 1.

Trump may have been attempting, in addition, to puff his own legendary savvy as a dealmaker. By transforming Putin from an adversary into a partner, Trump implied, he could reassert America’s global power while staying at home and refusing to send American troops abroad. And at a subliminal level, candidate Trump may also have been playing on his electorate’s dim fantasy that Putin is “a white Christian at war with brown Muslims.”

Of course, making sense of candidate Trump’s electorally expedient stance toward Putin is only a first step toward divining his administration’s potential Russia policy. Some moves, of course, are predictable. Sanctions will possibly be eased. The annexation of Crimea will presumably be accepted informally, though not formally. Cooperation in fighting the Islamic State will no doubt be ratcheted up, although denigrating remarks about Islam will come easier to Trump than to Putin, given the Russian Federation’s large Muslim population. But what can we see if we look past such particular issues and peer through the fog of an amateurish and fractious transition? Is there an overarching strategy that will be informing the Trump administration’s Russia policy?

Trump’s “America First” refrain is obviously more of a slogan than a doctrine. What makes it fascinating as a portent of the new administration’s foreign policy is the way it combines a turn toward disengagement and isolationism with an insistence that America will start “winning” the zero-sum global competition again. To put this in personal terms, president-elect Trump seems bent on wedding Rand Paul’s utopia of American disengagement with Dick Cheney’s utopia of a unilateral America über alles. But can such a marriage of irreconcilables be consummated?

To gain some purchase on the opportunities and dangers of this Janus-faced approach, it helps to recognize how closely Trump’s stance tracks Putin’s posture in international affairs. Trump presumably recognizes the convergence, having contrasted Putin’s bold leadership not only to Obama’s passivity and caution but also to Hillary Clinton’s hawkish fondness for foreign intervention. Without poring over State Department briefing books, Trump has an intuitive sense — justified, in our estimation — that Putin, rather than being a neo-Soviet imperialist, is a besieged leader whose bloody forays beyond Russia’s borders, however risky, have been basically defensive. He understands that Putin’s geopolitical adventures have been driven largely by an abiding anxiety about his country’s domestic weaknesses and Washington’s eagerness to embrace regime change abroad. The same cultural sensitivity that has allowed Trump to tune into the resentments of downwardly mobile white Americans helps explain his empathy for Putin, whose once-powerful country is now bereft of soft power — its economy is uncompetitive, its petrodollar-subsidized living standards are plummeting, and its population is aging and dwindling.

Putin’s foreign policy is marked by a kind of aggressive isolationism. His two guiding principles are disentanglement from the international system, symbolized by Moscow’s recent withdrawal from the Rome Statute of 2000, which set up the International Criminal Court, and a reassertion of Russia’s relevance as a global player, symbolized by the flotilla of Russian warships now participating in the siege of Aleppo. These also happen to be the two principles that inform the paradoxical approach to American power that Trump, too, guided not by experts but by his gut, has made his own.

Given this elective affinity, Trump’s initial discussions with Moscow will be very different from Obama’s ill-fated “reset.”

Given this elective affinity, Trump’s initial discussions with Moscow will be very different from Obama’s ill-fated “reset.” What Trump offers Putin is not simply cooperation on a range of issues where the two countries’ interests overlap. What he offers, instead, is a shared narrative about what went wrong in the post-Cold War world. Verbally, at least, he will hold out the possibility of a reactionary alliance against cosmopolitan liberalism and the rootless globalists who are undermining national sovereignty everywhere we look.

Unfortunately, a shared repugnance for liberal internationalism, celebrated and sealed by the clinking of champagne flutes in the Kremlin, is no guarantee of mutual cooperation or even peaceful coexistence. On the surface, Trump’s repeated assertion that America’s allies are swindling the United States, which reflects a piddling fee-for-service conception of alliances in general and especially of the arguably obsolete NATO alliance, might seem like music to Putin’s ears. But if we more closely examine the political earthquake of Nov. 8, we will see why a shared illiberalism will do little or nothing to reduce tensions between Russia and the United States.

First of all, the populist insurgency that just overthrew the American political establishment represents the very sort of resentment-fueled instability that frightens Moscow most. An ardent opponent of regime change, Putin has been subsidizing populist insurgencies in various European countries not to replace the governing parties but simply to sap the EU’s unity and coherence. Similarly, any hypothetical clandestine Russian involvement in the American presidential campaign was presumably aimed at weakening Clinton before she acceded to the presidency as well as discrediting the American political model in general, not at electing Trump. Nothing would unnerve the Kremlin more than a new rash of Orange Revolutions. The fact that they will now be anti-liberal rather than liberal revolutions is no real consolation. Let’s assume that Trump is being sincere when promising Putin non-interference in the domestic politics of other countries. By inspiring emulators, his seditious example will nevertheless be inherently threatening to ruling elites around the world. And while Putin has every reason to rejoice at Trump’s snide dismissals of NATO, he will be less enthusiastic about Trump’s insistence that all of America’s allies must increase their defense budgets to the promised 2 percent. Spooked by a seasoned dealmaker’s calculated bluff that he will otherwise cut them loose, the truant members of NATO are very likely to do just that.

Second, the U.S. election delivered a fatal blow to the dominant narrative designed to legitimate the Putin regime in the face of Russia’s poor and worsening economic conditions. According to this narrative, all Russia’s problems result from a global liberal conspiracy, led by the United States, to humiliate Russia and prevent it from assuming its rightful place in the world. But in an election covered 24/7 by Russian state media, the candidate who was repeatedly branded as “Putin’s puppet” was elected president by the American people. The way this democratic outcome has sabotaged Putin’s legitimacy formula can be illustrated by the comments of some of Russia’s leading nationalists. In a series of tweets after the election, Alexander Dugin declared that “Anti-Americanism is over”.

And this is not because it was wrong but exactly the opposite. It is because the American people themselves have started the revolution against precisely that aspect of the USA that we all hated. Now the European ruling elite as well as the part of the Russian elite that is still liberal cannot be blamed as before for being be too pro-American. From now on, it should be blamed for being what it is: a corrupt, perverted greedy gang of bankers and destroyers of cultures, traditions, and identities.

But the end of anti-Americanism, prematurely fêted by Russian nationalists, promises to be the beginning of a destabilizing crisis inside Russia. A principal source of Putin’s legitimacy since he returned to the presidency in 2012 has been the obsessively repeated accusation that the United States is a hypocritical superpower, publicly espousing universal values but acting secretly in pursuit of narrow national advantage. Trump’s embrace of “America First,” whatever it means in practice, makes nonsense out of Putin’s endlessly recycled excoriations of America’s inveterate hypocrisy.

On a more practical level, Trump’s election obliges Putin to own the chaos he has sowed in both Syria and eastern Ukraine.

On a more practical level, Trump’s election obliges Putin to own the chaos he has sowed in both Syria and eastern Ukraine. Standing up to the United States was arguably a principal motivation for Putin’s interventions in both countries, justified to the Russian public largely as ways of sticking a finger into America’s eye, revealing its weakness and hypocrisy, and teaching it that Russia cannot be ignored. But the president-elect’s expressed willingness to offer Putin a wide berth in both arenas greatly diminishes the domestic political value of the two incursions as sources of national pride. Here again, Trump’s embrace of Putin may soon come to resemble a kiss of death.

Third, Putin’s reassertion of Russia’s heft on the international stage has depended on his leading the revolt against American-orchestrated globalization. This picture has no doubt been scrambled by Trump’s eccentric argument that globalization is a conspiracy not by, but against, the United States. But the more important development is that the uncontested leader of the deglobalizing world, the most visible counter-revolutionary in the worldwide fight against liberal internationalism, will soon be the president of the United States, a figure immensely more powerful and imitation-worthy than the president of Russia. The unbridled enthusiasm with which Europe’s anti-establishment populists have greeted Trump’s victory reflects the fact that he is perfectly credible as a populist insurgent in a way that Putin, who has dominated the election-proof Russian state for almost two decades, is not. The rise of anti-EU populism in Europe could even have the paradoxical consequence of drawing Trump into a new trans-Atlantic alliance of populist democracies based on a new set of illiberal “shared values.”

Russia’s economic difficulties mean that Putin, to achieve relief from Western sanctions, may enter into a momentary Berlusconi-style bromance with the new U.S. president. But the honeymoon is unlikely to last because Russia’s economic difficulties oblige its government to hunt for enemies, foreign and domestic. It’s likely that Trump will also soon be looking to magnify the role of domestic and foreign enemies to fend off domestic criticism and explain his inevitable failures.

The likelihood of such a parallel search for enemies by two aggressive isolationists should clarify why Trump’s cozying up to Putin during the campaign doesn’t promise to make the world a safer or less hostile place. Parallels may never cross in geometry, but in geopolitics they can violently intersect, to catastrophic effect. What makes matters worse is that the foundation of mutual understanding that allowed Moscow and Washington to manage nail-biting crises during the Cold War has by now completely eroded. Although Trump might be able to reduce the overt animosity between the White House and the Kremlin, he will find it much more difficult to rebuild the two countries’ shared assumptions about how the world works. Senior members of Putin’s entourage have repeatedly resorted to reckless talk of nuclear blackmail, which will make it immensely difficult for Western leaders to keep a cool head in any high-stakes emergency. The paucity of steadying foreign-policy hands in Trump’s inner circle is equally worrying, as is the possibility that Trump’s habit of making friendly offhand comments, whether in tweets or at public rallies, may lead Russia to underestimate the possibility of a violent American response to incursions, say, into the Baltic states.

President-elect Trump arguably won the election by burning his bridges with the Republican Party’s foreign-policy and national-security establishments, but governing will require some of these bridges to be rebuilt. How this will work out in practice is still not known. One thing is certain, however: A gut-level aversion to foreign adventurism will not suffice to keep the country safe. Two proud and thin-skinned leaders with similar worldviews and wielding more unilateral power than it makes sense to confide in any single individual could, after an amiable interlude, all too easily trigger a tit-for-tat spiral of escalating insult and injury that may drag the helplessly watching world toward a catastrophe that no one could possibly intend.

“China said Monday that it had “serious concern” about President-elect Donald Trump’s most recent comments about Taiwan, and warned that any changes to how America deals with the self-governing island could damage diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing. China’s comments came a day after Trump said in a television interview that he didn’t feel “bound by a one-China policy.” Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said that established policy is the “political foundation” of any diplomatic relationship between China and the U.S., and that any damage to it could render cooperation “out of the question.” “We urge the new U.S. leader and government to fully understand the seriousness of the Taiwan issue, and to continue to stick to the one-China policy,” Geng said.

A report examines how the EU is countering Putin’s messages, “In France, Marine Le Pen of the National Front says Russia is doing a better job in Syria than Europe. In Britain, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage appears on Russia’s state-funded RT television channel, blaming the EU for the crisis in Ukraine. And members of Italy’s Five Star Movement share blog articles about small-business owners suffering because of Russian sanctions.

The upstart political parties’ messaging fits neatly into a pro-Russian narrative that, in recent months, has led experts and politicians to see a “Trojan horse” link between Europe’s rising anti-establishment movements and Moscow’s disinformation campaign. It’s one they say is aimed at undermining trust in democratic institutions, weakening NATO, and shifting debates in Europe to benefit Russia.

A recent study of 45 insurgent parties by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found a majority sympathized with the Russian government’s positions.

“What we are seeing now is a lot of backsliding on democratic values, democratic institutions, and media freedoms across the post-socialist space,” Alina Polyakova, co-author of a new Atlantic Council report on the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts in Western Europe, told Foreign Policy. “A lot of those negative changes are being brought about by populist politicians who are often aligned with Russia.”

Long an issue in Eastern and Central Europe, Western European countries are just waking up to the scope of Russian propaganda and influence as election season in Germany and France looms. It has prompted new investigations into the mechanics of Kremlin strategy and stepped-up efforts to counter fake news and promote EU democratic principles.

On Wednesday, the European Parliament passed a strongly worded resolution responding both to Russian disinformation and Islamic State propaganda. The report outlined how Russia has intensified its propaganda efforts since annexing Crimea from Ukraine and called for more funding to support media freedom and education. It was approved amid loud dissenting voices from populist members of the parliament who warned that lumping Russia into a report that also deals with Islamist terrorists is “hypocritical” and may goad Moscow into renewed Cold War tensions.

A headline from Tass, Russia’s state-owned news agency, said the report showed “liberal Europe’s weakness.” Russian President Vladimir Putin also weighed in, calling the resolution an example of “political degradation” of democracy in the West, according to RT. From Moscow’s perspective, the West is engaged in its own version of information operations. Putin has often argued that Washington has sought to undermine governments in Ukraine and Georgia under the guise of democracy promotion programs.

“This report is insane. It fosters hysteria against Russia and neo-McCarthyism in Europe. It’s a caricature of Russia,” said parliamentarian Javier Couso Permuy of Spain’s far-left Izquierda Unida coalition. He called for lifting sanctions and relaxing tensions with Russia.

Despite a year where Russian hacking and troll factory-generated news served as a backdrop to the U.S. election, the links between authentic political conviction of Europe’s populist parties and Moscow’s influence are far from straightforward.

Experts are quick to say it’s mostly impossible to track the extent to which pro-Russian positions in Europe are directly shaped by the Kremlin. It is extremely difficult to trace foreign investments that sometimes go through obscure channels and offshore accounts. Additionally, many European policy stances that could benefit Moscow genuinely stem from historical geopolitical concerns and skepticism of U.S. intervention. They’re also the result of legitimate criticisms of European dysfunction and the EU project.

“Russia has made the most out of it; benefited from it, [and] to a certain extent, is using it,” said Fredrik Wesslau, the director of ECFR’s Europe program. “But it is not the cause of European populism.”

Yet plenty of suspicious signals point to a symbiotic relationship. They include the discovery of an $11 million loan to France’s National Front that was routed through the Moscow-based First Czech-Russian Bank in 2014 and trips to the Russian capital by high-ranking deputies from anti-establishment parties like Italy’s Northern League and Five Star Movement.

Many experts and European officials believe Russia is mainly exploiting the same democratic conventions that protect free speech to help amplify its view. Arguments first spotted on Sputnik, notorious for trafficking in distorted information and even outright lies, increasingly end up on political blogs and filter into mainstream arguments.

“You can say there’s a certain zeitgeist right now,” Mitchell Orenstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said at an Atlantic Council event this month. “There are many people in Europe, as well as in the United States, who are certainly not being paid by the Kremlin and yet are taking pro-Russian stances on foreign policy.”

“The danger is not only that there are agents of influence,” Orenstein said. “The danger is winning the hearts and minds of quite a lot of people in Europe.”

Moscow’s narrative, analysts say, isn’t aimed only at loosening the consensus on EU sanctions against Russia over its armed intervention in Ukraine. The propaganda effort is also an attempt to muddy the waters around controversial domestic issues on the continent, such as immigration and LGBT rights, and to undermine the EU by portraying it as an unwieldy and incoherent governing body.

“The target audience is precisely the people who have a certain distrust toward the elite or the established opinions,” said Sijbren de Jong, a strategic analyst at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.

“One of their most popular tactics is to consistently, whenever they do something wrong — and they very often do — to point out that the others are just as bad,” de Jong said. “They know we tolerate dissenting voices, whereas they don’t, so they make ample use of this.”

The resolution passed on Wednesday recommended that EU institutions monitor sources of financing for anti-European propaganda. It called for beefing up task force powers to highlight disinformation tactics and for asking the European Commission to provide more funding to independent media outlets. But the report itself doesn’t have much teeth to implement these policies.

Even so, said Anna Fotyga, a Polish member of the European Parliament who oversaw the drafting of the report, said it was an achievement in itself to establish an official EU position and raise awareness among member states. “For the first time, the EU decided to speak in a very open way in areas that were well-known but lacking in description,” she told FP.

Some experts say specialized strategic communication units are the key to making sure disinformation campaigns don’t get free rein to muddy up fast-breaking news narratives. The case of the false “Lisa story” in Germany from January is often cited as a textbook example: Mainstream news media reported allegations that a German-Russian girl had been raped by migrants in Berlin before German authorities had time to verify the information and respond. When the story was debunked, subsequent accusations of a cover-up — even fueled by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — led to large protests.

A year ago, the EU established a disinformation task force, East StratCom, that employs 11 mostly Russian speakers who scour the web for fake news and send out biweekly reviews highlighting specific distorted news stories and tactics. So far, the newsletter has 20,000 readers each week. Last week, the EU parliament voted to increase its funding.

But the impact of such initiatives remains unclear in an internet age where people cocoon themselves in information bubbles to reinforce their strongly held views. East StratCom currently doesn’t have enough resources to measure public impact and can only count the number of subscribers and Twitter impressions its work generates.

It can also be tricky to calibrate a response beyond pointing out disinformation that doesn’t overstep the bounds of free speech and democratic values. After all, EU politicians and experts say there is little point to fighting propaganda with propaganda or conspiracy theories with more conspiracy theories.

“It’s important to not fall into the trap of thinking that Russia is behind everything, and is everywhere, and is 10 feet tall,” Wesslau said. “The risk is that we overreact and take measures that undermine our open societies.”

Latvia and its large Russian-speaking population walked the edge of the dilemma this year. The country temporarily restricted Russian media three times in 2016, citing examples of hate speech and warmongering, including TV personalities who accused Ukraine of “undertaking genocide against Russians” and urging viewers against negotiating with Ukraine and instead to “destroy it militarily.” The content was still accessible online, but Una Bergmane, a researcher at Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, said the ban was more a statement of values and less an attempt to completely shut down the flow of information.

“How effective that is, we don’t know yet,” she added.

Other experts say pointing out false information emanating from state-sponsored outlets like Sputnik and RT is low-hanging fruit. They say the Kremlin’s web of influence runs much deeper and requires significant steps to increase transparency and expose individuals or groups receiving Russian money.

“StratCom usually captures these very blatant kind of lies, but you have this more subtle influence through ownership,” said Ruslan Stefanov, a director at the Bulgaria-based Center for the Study of Democracy. He recently released a report attempting to chart the relationship between money and Russian influence, and recommended European countries provide more transparency around media ownership and foreign investments.

Still, others are less concerned that populist foreign-policy stances are swaying voters. Vaclav Bartuska, the Czech Republic’s energy security ambassador-at-large, called Russian propaganda “ineffective” and said voters were more interested in the economy.

“What they are selling is simply not something people want,” he said. “I mean, they spend billions of dollars on building a TV network, RT, radios, online magazines, influence — and what do they get for it?”

On the other hand, underestimating the potential effects of Russian disinformation would be “naive,” Polyakova, the Atlantic Council co-author, said.

“The EU project right now is teetering, and what Russia is doing is stirring the pot,” she said. “This is the time to act to reinforce democratic institutions to respond to disinformation by countering it and also investing in our own principles and values.”

Ultimately, the spread of fake news and the rise of populist voices echoing Kremlin talking points are reminders for the EU to look in the mirror, said Richard Youngs of Carnegie Europe.

“It is easy and necessary to criticize Russia and advocate a robust response to its disinformation,” he said. “But we should, I think, also state at home and understand what is so dysfunctional about our own democracies that enables such obvious lies to gain traction.”

“The White House is struggling to prevent a crippling exodus of foreign policy staffers eager to leave before the arrival of the Trump administration, according to current and former officials. The top level officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are political appointees who have to submit resignations and leave in a normal transition. The rest of the 400 NSC staff are career civil servants on secondment from other departments. An unusual number of these more junior officials are now looking to depart. Many are concerned by a proliferation of reports about the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. On Wednesday the Washington Post reported that Flynn had improperly shared classified information with foreign military officers. On the same day, CNN reported that the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had this week deleted a tweet he had sent out a few days before the election that linked to a fake news story suggesting Hillary Clinton took part in crimes against children. “Career people are looking get out and go back to their agencies and pressure is being put on them to get them to stay. There is concern there will be a half-empty NSC by the time the new administration arrives, which no one wants,” said one official.

A report notes that “at a Beijing hotel last week, a few hundred men — and a few women — met to debate the rules that govern the world’s most powerful political party. The Chinese Communist Party’s annual plenum, like everything else about the party’s leadership, is tightly sealed; all that’s revealed to outsiders is the announcements afterward, not the squabbles and intrigues during the meeting. Big decisions come at plenums, but this one is particularly important because it’s the last one before the upcoming Party Congress in 2017, an even bigger meeting that will determine the course of China’s leadership for the following five years”.

The piece notes “Two things stand out about the Sixth Plenum. The first is that after a set of annual meetings in 2013 on the importance of the economy, rule of law, and social development, the real story over this period, which has become clear only now, turns out to have actually been about the party itself all along. It’s the party that has been incrementally strengthened by each of the previous years’ initiatives. And the second is that in the march toward the crucial date of 2021, the party’s authority, for good or bad, is inextricably linked with Xi Jinping, China’s president, as the new “core” of its leadership. In 2021, Xi has promised that China will be a “moderately prosperous society” — guided by the party under Xi’s tutelage. We can be certain of one thing: Xi and the party come as one package, as the announcements confirming him as the “core leader” show. Xi Jinping’s China is one of grand narratives — the “Chinese Dream”; the One Belt, One Road initiative; and the various foreign-policy stories that China has been telling the world since Xi came to power in 2012. The party is the hero of all these tales, retold at the gatherings of the elite for the plenum each year”.

The Third Plenum in 2013 was memorable because of its oxymoronic statement that complete marketization was necessary for reform while at the same time vehemently asserting that the state would keep playing a decisive role in all economic matters. 2014 saw rule of law prioritized, but with the unspoken proviso that a stronger legal system could never be turned on its political creators. In 2015, attention turned to the prosaic 13th Five-Year Plan, full of nitty-gritty details like carbon emission savings, production levels for state enterprises, and price stability predictions, all contributing to the grand march toward the “moderate prosperity” that is meant to come at the end of all this.

The link between all these meetings is simple: the party. Strengthening the party, disciplining the party, building the party, and, above all, making the party sustainable through better economic policies (2013), better rule of law (2014), and better planning (2015) — that’s the shared story. And the 2016 gathering tackled this issue with a vengeance. Its communiqué simply asserted that only with a unified, loyal, well-disciplined, and resolute party could the country finally reach modernity “with Chinese characteristics.” Thus the earnest appeals this year to maintain fidelity to party unity, support party building, and — the really crucial piece — to stay faithful to the party leadership.

Hence the outcome that made all the headlines — the addition of the simple words “the core of the leadership” to Xi’s name. Xi already has every other moniker going: party secretary, president, chairman of the military, and chair of the most important leading small groups, right down to his appearance as commander in chief in fatigues last year to show his military credentials.

Xi’s appetite for titles seems unlimited as a junta leader’s lust for medals.

Xi’s appetite for titles seems unlimited as a junta leader’s lust for medals. But this one carries particularly profound symbolic and ideological weight.

The idea of a leader at the core goes back to the era of Deng Xiaoping, as an acknowledgement of his uniquely powerful position in politics in post-1978 China, despite his having no formal role much of the time. It was passed on to then-President Jiang Zemin as a means of legitimizing his power after the upset caused by Tiananmen in 1989, when plenty were tempted to simply regard him as a stopgap. Despite all the noise about its use, “core” is honorific — it carries no institutional or real powers. Its import is wholly symbolic.

This means that the failure to confer the title on Hu Jintao, Xi’s immediate predecessor, never really had much impact. The more excitable interpret this as a sign that he was never fully empowered. Yet in the booming 2000s, when things were relatively stable, and because the succession had been relatively smooth (despite Jiang insistently hanging around), there was never really any need to refer to Hu as a “core leader.” It sounded old-fashioned. Even when Jiang used it in the 1990s, interpreters mocked it for its pompous sound, and although it was never formally taken from him as a description, it appeared less and less beside his name.

The formal comeback of the term in 2016 can be seen either as a sign that Xi is amassing powers unlike any of his previous predecessors or that he is shoring up his insecurities with yet another verbal trinket with no real political worth. The reality probably lies in between. The incessant hunt for new names and titles for Xi is starting to look desperate and insecure. Surely just being party secretary is enough — that is where the power is. All the other positions are subservient to this one.

But in the bigger narrative of party building developed since 2013, Xi being named the core of the leadership falls into place and makes sense — at least, as part of this story. It’s a recognition that the party vision, its view of its role in the building of a victoriously modern China, is intimately linked with a specific style of leadership — that practiced by Xi. Focusing on Xi in himself is to miss something crucially important. It’s the style of leadership he practices and that the party is collectively supporting that is important, not him and his personal ambition and networks. This style of leadership is strong on demanding loyalty, strong on centralization, and strong on placing the party at the heart of Chinese social and political development. And it’s strong on demanding that everyone around it recognize that it’s strong.

All of this sets up the mood music for next year’s Party Congress, where the ideas of party development, centrality, and unified leadership will be even further driven into the public consciousness. After that, the focus will move to how this leadership and political organization are going to deliver the promised moment of 2021-2022 when “moderate prosperity” rains from the sky. For all the talk of party issues this year, the public judgment in five years’ time will not be about how well the party has cleaned up its inner workings, reduced its jargon, and trained its cadres better. It’ll be about the promised end: clean air, prosperous and plentiful jobs, affordable housing, and a sense that things are getting better.

The Sixth Plenum has agreed on the fundamental tools needed for this goal — party unity and discipline. We’ll have to wait and see whether this is actually the most effective way to realize the immense objectives laid out for the next five years. If the party can’t produce these tangible goals, Xi’s “core” may turn out hollow.

“Lawmakers in Congress intensified their calls for a probe into hacking during the 2016 election, raising chances of a clash with President-elect Donald Trump. Trump continues to reject the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow is to blame, telling Time Magazine that he does not believe the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was behind the hacks. House Democrats introduced legislation Wednesday that would convene a bipartisan, independent commission to look into alleged Russian attempts to interfere and sow distrust in this year’s voting. On the Senate side, a senior Republican told CNN that he will be directing his committees “to look deeply into what Russia may have done in regarding our election.” The congressional moves come as Time published an interview with Trump in which he dismissed the intelligence community’s October assessment that it had high confidence that Russia was behind hacks. They largely targeted Democrats, including the Democratic National Committee. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they interfered,” Trump is quoted as saying”.

An important article notes that some Christians are returning to Iraq, “Christians are finally returning to the Church of the Immaculate Conception. In the courtyard, they find piles of shell casings and mannequin torsos riddled with bullet holes. The Islamic State fighters who held the building until just a few days ago used the space for target practice. The cavernous interior of the church, the largest in Iraq, is charred and black. The floors are strewn with trash. Islamic State fighters destroyed the crosses and burned any religious books they could find. Now a man is searching through the rubble, salvaging scraps of manuscripts in Aramaic, the ancient language spoken by Jesus. A small group of priests and local people gathers around the altar, and for the first time in two years, the sound of prayer fills the hall”.

It adds “Gunfire and shelling can still be heard not far away. A man goes up to the darkened altar and kisses it, shaking his head in disbelief at the level of destruction. One of the priests finds a few pieces of communion wafer and wraps them respectfully in paper. “This is Christ’s body, after all,” he says. Before the Islamic State launched its war in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, the town of Hamdaniya (also known as Qaraqosh or Bakhdida), 20 miles southeast of Mosul, was home to 50,000 people, most of whom belonged to several ancient Christian sects. These are some of the oldest Christian communities in the world, and the Islamic State was determined to wipe them out. When the jihadis invaded, most residents fled to safety in the nearby Kurdish region or left the country entirely. Now the military campaign to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, has liberated nearby Hamdaniya, potentially enabling its people to revive their unique and imperiled culture. But that task seems horribly daunting for the first brave ones who made the journey to their ruined hometown”.

It mentions “A sense of jubilation momentarily unites the liberators — the Christian militias and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army soldiers who fought together against the Islamic State (which espouses a twisted version of Sunni Islam). Shiite mullahs and Christian priests tour Hamdaniya together. The cross on the majestic dome of another church, St. Barbara’s, was destroyed by the jihadis. It has now been replaced by a wooden cross — courtesy of the Iraqi Army. “I haven’t seen my home in two and a half years,” says Jameel, a young member of the Nineveh Plain Protection Units, a 500-strong Assyrian Christian militia. “Now I’m back, and it’s beautiful, even though everything is bombed out.” A self-described poet, he joined the militia last year. On his iPhone, he proudly shows off a photo of a dead Islamic State fighter he says he killed. But there are mixed feelings about how to move forward. Despite the euphoria, there’s a sense that the fabric of Iraqi society is as fragile as ever. A desire for revenge against Sunnis simmers beneath the surface”.

It notes how “Iraqi Army Humvees and armoured personnel carriers, some adorned with images of revered Shiite Muslim leaders, roam the ruined streets. Many of the houses once owned by Christians are burned-out hulks, their walls spray-painted with Islamic State graffiti. In some places, a jihadi slogan — “Islamic State is here and will expand” — has been painted over with praise for Christian militias. One sign proclaims hopefully, “We are all Iraq.” But many of the returnees are focusing first on the idea of reviving their own endangered community, not on building a common nation. During his stint in parliament, Ayshon worked on legislation to prevent Christians from selling their land to any other community. He says it’s important for them to hold on to their place in Iraq. “Our roots go back 5,000 years,” he says, referring to Assyrian Iraqis. “We built this civilization, which they, the Arabs from the desert, have destroyed.” “We built this civilization, which they, the Arabs from the desert, have destroyed.” He makes little effort to hide his contempt for the majority of Iraqi society — yet another reminder of the mutual distrust that permeates the country. But he insists that he doesn’t want to pick a fight”.

Importantly he writes “Iraqi Christians want two things: assurance of their future security and acknowledgment of their past suffering. To these ends, Ayshon this year founded Shlomo, a nongovernmental organization that documents violence and intimidation against Christians in Iraq. The group’s volunteers claim to have collected 30,000 testimonies from Christians who fled the Islamic State. Ayshon says almost all of the 130,000-150,000 Christians who lived in the Nineveh plains, the area east of Mosul, have been displaced. His group has tracked cases of killings, torture, forced conversions, and the kidnapping and selling of Christian girls and women. “We want to prove that what has happened to Christians is a genocide,” Ayshon says. “I want the U.S. State Department and Congress to say that what happened here was genocide and maybe take the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.” Ayshon dreams of an autonomous Christian province within Iraq, which he says could be secured by a referendum. Its safety, he says, should be assured by its own protection forces. “We want to live as we want, not as they [Muslims] want us to live,” he adds. In thinking this way, he is not alone”.

It ends “Back in Hamdaniya, Ayshon gets tired of waiting for the army to provide protection for his homecoming. He persuades a fighter from the Nineveh Plain Protection Units to escort us so we can go and see what has become of his former home. The militiaman enters the burnt-out house first to check for booby traps or Islamic State fighters who have stayed behind. After he gives the all-clear, we follow him in to find shattered glass and charred walls. The furniture is gone or destroyed. Ayshon looks around stoically. Amid the rubble, he finds his college diploma in electrical engineering, the only thing that remains intact. “At least the fountain in the garden is still standing,” he says wryly. “That’s a start.” By the time we’re ready to leave, an Iraqi Army Humvee is waiting. An officer scolds Ayshon for driving around in a civilian vehicle that could easily be mistaken for an Islamic State suicide car bomb. On our way back to Erbil, where Ayshon has been living for the past two years, he sighs, thinking of the destruction. But he’s determined to remain optimistic. “When the people return, life will return,” he says. “But we need money and jobs fast to restore Iraqi Christians’ faith in their own land.”

“Iran has shipped 11 tonnes of heavy water abroad to bring its stock back under a limit set by its landmark nuclear deal with major powers, according to a diplomat citing a confidential U.N. nuclear watchdog report. The shipment is a step toward resolving a dispute with Western powers including the United States that are keen to prevent Iran from testing the deal’s terms. The report substantiated an Iranian statement last month about a transfer to Oman but does not identify the destination, the diplomat said. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is policing the restrictions placed on Iran’s atomic activities under the July 2015 deal, said in a report last month that Iran’s stock of heavy water had for the second time exceeded a soft limit of 130 tonnes, and the IAEA expressed its concerns to Tehran. “On 6 December the agency verified the quantity of 11 metric tonnes of the nuclear-grade heavy water at its destination outside Iran,” the diplomat quoted the five-paragraph report by the IAEA to member states as saying. “This transfer of heavy water out of Iran brings Iran’s stock of heavy water to below 130 tonnes,” it said, adding that Iran had told the agency that the shipment left the country on Nov. 19.

An article argues that Trump has returned America to its norm of fighting over identity, morality and religion, “Americans have elected an “illiberal democrat” as president. That doesn’t mean the United States will become an illiberal democracy — where democratically elected leaders fundamentally erode the rights and freedoms we associate with the classical liberal tradition — anytime soon. But it does mean we could become one. As a minority and a Muslim, the result of this election is distressing — and perhaps the most frightening event I’ve experienced in my own country. That said, there is something admirable in the idea that democratic outcomes will be respected even when people you hate (or people that hate you) come to power. I’ve studied “existential” elections in the Middle East, where there is simply too much at stake for the losers of elections to accept that the victors have, in fact, won. I was nervous about Donald Trump. But I also recognized that he was an unusuallycompelling candidate in an age when they are few and far between. I remember the first time I heard him give a long, rambling, ad-libbed speech at a raucous rally. It’s not just that I couldn’t look away; I didn’t want to. Trump was funny, charismatic, and vaguely charming but also quite obviously petty and vindictive. His rallies were more like faith-based festivals. This wasn’t politics as an end — it was politics as a means to something else, although I wasn’t quite sure what. But I did know that I had seen it before”.

The writer goes on to point out “It’s almost unfair to compare Trump to the democratically elected Islamists that I normally study, since Trump’s open disrespect not just for liberal norms, but democratic ones as well, has been so unabashed. In his infamous statement during the final presidential debate, Trump refused to commit himself to democratic outcomes if his opponent won. Mainstream Islamist groups that participate in elections — whatever we think their true intentions are — have rarely gone this far. The differences between ethno-nationalist parties, such as Trump’s new Republicans, and religious parties are of course numerous, which makes the similarities all the more glaring. There is the same sense of victimization, real and imagined, at the hands of an entrenched elite, coupled with an acute sense of loss. In both cases, the leader of the movement is seen as the embodiment of the national will, representing “the people.” The overlap between Trumpism and Islamism is no coincidence. In my book Islamic Exceptionalism, which discusses Islam’s tensions with liberalism and liberal democracy, I argue that some public role for religion is necessary in religiously conservative societies. Religion, unlike secular nationalism or socialism, can provide a common language and a kind of asabiyya — a 14th-century Arabic term coined by the historian Ibn Khaldun meaning roughly “group consciousness.” Asabiyya was needed to bind states together, providing cohesion and shared purpose”.

The author crucially argues that “In less religious or “post-Christian” societies, a mainstream Christianity is no longer capable of providing the necessary group identity. But that doesn’t mean other ideas won’t fill the vacuum. In other words, be careful what you wish for: An America where religion plays less of a role isn’t necessarily a better one, if what replaces religion is white nativism. Whether it’s nativism, European-style ethno-nationalism, or, in the case of the Middle East, Islamism, the thread that connects these disparate experiments is similar: the flailing search for a politics of meaning. The ideologies might seem incoherent or hollow, but they all aspire to some sort of social solidarity, anchoring public life in sharply defined identities. During the Arab Spring, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood hoped, at least in the long run, to transform Egypt into a kind of missionary state. The essence of politics then isn’t just, or even primarily, about improving citizens’ quality of life — it’s about directing their energies toward moral, philosophical, or ideological ends. When the state entrusts itself with a cause — whether based around religion or ethnic identity — citizens are no longer individuals pursuing their own conception of the good life; they are part of a larger brotherhood, entrusted with a mission to reshape society”.

Pointedly he contends that “This isn’t necessarily surprising. Western elites too often assume liberalism as a default setting, but after spending more than six years living, studying, and conducting fieldwork in the Middle East, and after witnessing the demise of the Arab Spring, my view of human nature became quite a bit darker. Illiberalism, not liberalism, seemed the default setting. Islamism promised to remove the spiritual confusion associated with individualism and seemingly unlimited choices. I’ll never forget sitting in the back of a Cairo cab with a random guy, who was getting high on hashish and going on about the need for sharia, or Islamic law. He wanted an Islamic state to force him to stop doing drugs because he didn’t want to sin. But he didn’t know how, at least not on his own. Despite watching the march of illiberalism nearly everywhere, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, I resisted my own conclusions when it came to considering the appeal of Trump’s illiberalism at home”.

He continues “As a personality, he was singular and compelling — but could he really win in a country where constitutional liberalism was so deeply entrenched? Intellectually, I knew we had to take his movement seriously and thought he had a good chance of winning. But as an American citizen with a stake in my country’s democratic ideals, I couldn’t bring myself to actually visualize it as something real. We all need to believe in our better angels, particularly when it comes to the very countries in which we live and believe. The writer Yascha Mounk called Nov. 8 “the worst night for liberal democracy since [1942].” He’s probably right. But there is a perhaps sunnier way to view Trump’s election: It could prove a definitive rebuke to what liberal democracy had, contrary to the intent of its originators, become — the kind of center-left managerial technocracy that was as uninspiring as it was unthreatening. This techno-liberalism could, to be sure, improve people’s lives by nudgingand tinkering around the margins. But aside from the “poetry” of periodic moments like Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, it offered only the prose of technocratic policy — prose that could become its own kind of faith, offering certainty and even a sense of identity, but primarily directed at elites and wonks who believed that the future of politics was in finding the right “facts.” These facts, objective and unimpeachable, would aid in the slow work of, say, refining a flawed universal health-care system and getting Wall Street to behave a little bit better. For everyone else, it failed to offer a substantive politics of meaning”.

Importantly he posits that “Humans need to belong, and so we gravitate toward in-groups of like-minded people. In my case, those like-minded people are of different races and religions, but we share a culture, lifestyle, and a sensibility. We were moved by the kind of joyous diversity on display at the Democratic National Convention. In those images, I could recognize the America that I knew and perhaps the only America I hoped to know.But most members of the so-called and now somewhat clichéd “white working class” relate to each other more than they could ever relate to me. They see me as different, in part because I am. Is this a kind of nativism? Maybe. But, ultimately, my politics are just as motivated by identity and culture as theirs. The decline of Christianity in the United States has left an ideological vacuum, and for many, perhaps most, modern liberalism is just a bit too boring to fill the gap. Or, to put it differently, it doesn’t provide the existential meaning that they want and even crave”.

He ends “In his seminal essay “The End of History?” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama grappled with the victory of liberal democracy. He wrote that “the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” But Fukuyama was ambivalent about this, instinctively recognizing liberal democracy’s inherent weakness before most. He ended his article on a prescient if now somewhat terrifying note: “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.” We are now condemned to live in exciting times. Boredom is, quite clearly, underrated. At the same time, I must confess that as Trump’s victory settled, my despair was coupled with a rush of blood to the head. I felt my fear, including for my family, giving me a sense of purpose. I at least knew what I believed in and what I hoped America could still become. And, in one way or another, even if we don’t quite consciously want it, it’s something we all apparently need — something, whatever it is, to fight for. Now Americans on both sides of the ever-widening divide will have it.

“Without ever using Donald Trump’s name, Barack Obama savaged his successor’s stated inclinations on counterterrorism while issuing an impassioned plea not to sacrifice fundamental American values in the name of national security. Obama used the final set-piece security speech of his presidency to present a highly selective account of his record, particularly about the mass surveillance architecture he embraced and the drone strikes that will be synonymous with his name. In doing so, Obama argued that he avoided “overreach” and tacitly implored Trump to follow his template. “People and nations do not make good decisions when they are driven by fear,” Obama warned at MacDill air force base in Florida, before a military audience to whom he paid tribute. “These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon.” Obama reserved a note of retribution for the Republican Congress that he holds responsible for preventing him from closing the Guantánamo Bay detention center. He suggested that he would continue transferring detainees until he leaves the Oval Office on 20 January, even though that tactic alone will not empty the Cuban facility.

Andrew Brown writes about the importance of understanding Threasa May’s faith when it come sto understanding Brexit, “Among the least understood, yet most important, things about British Prime Minister Theresa May is that she is the daughter of a Church of England vicar. The fact that she is personally devout, by contrast, is well-known. I have heard several anecdotes about her time as a member of Parliament and minister when she would turn up at local parish initiatives that could offer her no conceivable political advantage. Such devotion to the church is unusual if not unknown among British politicians. Gordon Brown remains a very serious Presbyterian; Tony Blair went to Mass most Sundays. But the reason May’s Anglicanism offers insight into her political character, and her political agenda, is not because it has informed her identity as a devout Christian. Rather, it is because it has informed her identity as an Englishwoman”.

Brown argues “As a Conservative politician, May’s appeal depends largely on her apparently apolitical common sense. Her manner and rhetoric always suggest that things are pretty much all right as they are, that reasonable people don’t want to rock the boat, and that there is something wrong with the people who want large change. She expresses distrust of ideologues and chancers — the two labels that most naturally attach to her political rivals at the moment. But it’s telling that the teachings of the Church of England have always managed to combine common sense with a very strong nationalistic streak. The clue is in the name. The one thing that distinguished Henry VIII’s church from that of his father, Henry VII, was that the king of England appointed the clergy, not the bishop of Rome. Doctrine had hardly changed at all. (That would have to wait until the convulsions under Henry VIII’s children, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth.) Until Henry died, all that really changed was that England became, to use the technical term of the times, an “empire.” In that sense, Brexit really is a continuation of the Reformation impulse — it promises nothing so much as a restoration of national prerogatives and privileges”.

Brown notes that “This is not to suggest that May, who is now obliged to oversee the Brexit process, is enthusiastic about its prospects. Prior to the referendum vote that initiated Brexit, May believed the economic effects were likely to be disastrous, as her leaked pre-referendum speech to Goldman Sachs showed. And her intentions about Brexit are still remarkably opaque: A senior aide leaving a recent briefing at the newly created Department for Exiting the EU was photographed holding a briefing note on which the words “have cake and eat it” could be read. That plan will clearly not survive contact with the enemy. But it’s worth noting that May seemed quick to embrace the idea of a hard Brexit, in which keeping out immigrants takes priority over ensuring decent trading conditions. And that would be consistent with her time leading the Home Office, where she showed a consistent determination to keep down net immigration figures. (Someone who worked with her then described her three policy priorities as “down with immigration, down with crime, and up with Theresa May.”) Generally, the leaks we have had make it seem that she is more concerned about managing her party, and its constituents, than managing relations with the French and Germans”.

Brown points out “If Americans don’t immediately grasp what this style of thinking has to do with the Church of England, that’s because it’s built on a very different model of Christianity from the one that seems natural in the United States. From the Middle Ages until very recently, the church was organized and understood itself on the basis of the parish. The parish, in England, is a geographical division, one that is no longer a unit of political or economic significance but which remains fundamental to the church’s self-understanding. Everyone lives in a parish, and every parish has its church, so everyone has a priest in the Church of England who is in some sense responsible for their spiritual welfare. This has also meant that the church hierarchy — the clergy, and ultimately the bishops, who sit in the House of Lords and thus have a say over all legislation considered by Parliament — is expected to feel a responsibility for everyone in their respective parishes, no matter how poor and miserable. This sense of responsibility, almost as much as the two world wars, was what reconciled the English Conservative Party, which had a close relationship with the church hierarchy, to the welfare state. And that state was very much inspired by the work of Anglican intellectuals, such as William Temple, the wartime archbishop of Canterbury. For that generation, the postwar welfare state was an attempt to turn England into the New Jerusalem. The Christian elements of that vision faded with time and so did the nationalist ones. The last ones may now be coming back”.

Brown mentions “The Church of England is, in an important sense, not a religious body at all. It is, or was, a mode of being English. It was the official position of the Church of England that it had no distinctive doctrines of its own. It was simply the English part of the universal church. This claim was hard to sustain in reality — the doctrine that the Church of England has no unique doctrines is itself unique to the Church of England — but it reflected a deep conservative self-confidence. It was only as a member of the Church of England that C.S. Lewis could write a book titled Mere Christianity, referencing the plain, commonsensical essence of belief, without the extravagance of Rome or the doctrinal extremism of the puritans. The link with May should be obvious. The lack of explicit theological distinctiveness in her church coheres with an almost complete lack of ideology in her politics. She seems to have no large vision of how society should be organized or the economy run: She sees problems in her nation and fixes them, without worrying too much about how everything might fit into a grand scheme. If she had a slogan, it might be “common sense without stupidity.” The Brexit vote would seem to contradict both halves of the slogan. But we still have no clear idea how she intends to deal with it — except that she does not intend to let anyone outside the government know anything until the last possible moment. The attempt to negotiate what is supposed to be a return to parliamentary sovereignty without a vote in Parliament is one example. Another is her repetition of the phrase “Brexit means Brexit” until its lack of meaning became embarrassingly obvious”.

He ends “It’s almost as if she believed her policies could be as private as her spiritual beliefs. Though she has by all accounts a strong sense of duty, May is quite remarkably undemonstrative. She is extremely private about her religious beliefs, as with all other aspects of her private life; this, too, is a traditional sort of Englishness, in which you perform your duties but have no public existence outside them. Those duties sometimes take a universalist cast. One of the causes May pushed hardest at the Home Office and elsewhere was the fight against modern slavery. There are few votes to be won in this fight, but it is the right thing to do, and she has worked very hard to ensure that problem was taken seriously throughout the criminal justice system. The bishops would agree with her on that, while being a long way to her left on welfare reform and on the treatment of refugees. It’s very notable that some of the most bigoted social conservatives on the English Christian scene are also in favour of the large-scale resettlement of Christian refugees from around the world to England. Generally, however, May’s political career is given coherence by her supposition that her Christian duty is to the people of England rather than to humanity in general or even to other Christians”.

He finishes “This is another thing that distinguishes state churches, on the European model, from congregational ones, on the American model. The state church is not something you join, or leave, any more than the nation is. It is run as a kind of public utility: a national spiritual health service, if you like. In Germany and Scandinavia, the churches are paid for out of taxation collected by the state, as the English church once was, even if the church taxes in Europe are now voluntary. Because there is no special membership status, no one is excluded either, and there is an obligation to serve everyone. May’s father was legally obliged to marry or bury any resident of the parish who demanded this service — the assumption being that they were members of the church. May won’t bring her faith into politics explicitly, but we can expect her to behave as if England were a special, almost sacred, country in ways that none of her immediate predecessors, much less Americans, would understand”.

“The US military in Afghanistan is increasingly trying to control public information about the war, resulting in strained relations with western organisations offering different versions of events to official military accounts, the Guardian has learned. In a recent incident, the most senior US commander in Afghanistan, Gen John W Nicholson, considered banning or restricting the UN’s access to a military base in Kabul, according to informed sources in both organisations. The dispute followed a UN report in late September claiming that a US drone had killed 15 civilians. Washington insists it only killed members of Islamic State. UN and US military officials declined to speak to the Guardian, but various sources confirmed that working relations were “a nightmare”, as a UN staff member put it”.

A piece discusses the confirmation propsects of Rex Tillerson, “selecting ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump is facing his first major test with Senate Republicans who are wary of his warming relations with Russia — and have warned his cabinet pick is far from assured. Trump is betting Tillerson’s corporate management experience and support from former GOP statesmen will ease the concerns of a handful of Republican hawks over the oilman’s extensive business dealings with Moscow”.

The piece goes on to note “Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who lost the Republican presidential primary to Trump after being repeatedly belittled as “Little Marco,” said he had “serious doubts” about the nomination, and alluded to Exxon’s vast global assets. “The next secretary of state must be someone who views the world with moral clarity, is free of potential conflicts of interest,” Rubio said in a Tuesday statement”. The article adds “The Republicans’ slim 52-48 majority in the Senate doesn’t give Trump a lot of breathing room. Rubio sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, which must first clear Tillerson’s nomination before a floor vote. Republicans outnumber Democrats on the panel by just one vote, making Rubio a critical power player if Democrats unanimously seek to block Tillerson’s nomination. Democrats have already criticized Tillerson’s credentials, including Exxon’s opposition to greenhouse gas regulations, questioning of climate change science, and ties to abusive governments in Indonesia and Equatorial Guinea”.

The article notes “The nomination also comes amid reports that the CIA has concluded that Russia interfered in the U.S. election in order to boost Trump’s chances over Hillary Clinton. Lawmakers in both parties have pledged to investigate the matter. Four Republican senators who have needled Tillerson’s Russia ties — Rubio, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain — are now the focus of an expected and concerted lobbying push by Trump’s allies and aides. Graham, who also challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, called it “unnerving” that Tillerson received the Russian government’s Order of Friendship award in 2013. McCain, meanwhile, has openly questioned the Texas oilman’s loyalties. “I don’t see how anybody could be a friend of this old-time KGB agent,” McCain told CNN Monday, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin”.

The piece goes on to mention how “Trump, however, has a powerful ally in Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, whom the president-elect also reportedly considered for the role of top U.S. diplomat. In a statement, Corker called Tillerson “a very impressive individual [who] has an extraordinary working knowledge of the world.” But the committee’s Democrats already are gearing up for a fight. Sen. Ben Cardin, the panel’s ranking Democrat, has said he’s “deeply troubled” by Tillerson’s “close personal ties with Vladimir Putin” and vocal opposition to U.S. sanctions against Russia following its annexation of Crimea. Those sanctions gummed up a few of Exxon’s largest deals in Russia, including a Siberia agreement with the state oil company potentially worth tens of billions of dollars. Cardin — who said Tuesday he will give Tillerson a fair nomination hearing — is expected to drill down into the businessman’s views on Russia, Ukraine, and Exxon’s stance on global warming. And other Democrats have made clear they will call out Republicans for hypocrisy if Tillerson is easily approved after years of GOP lawmakers accusing the Obama administration of going soft on Putin”.

It later makes the point “Democratic attacks, however, must contend with a flood of support for Tillerson by GOP House and Senate leaders and elder statesmen, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State James Baker. Tillerson “would bring to the position vast knowledge, experience and success in dealing with dozens of governments and leaders in every corner of the world,” Gates said in a statement. “He is a person of great integrity whose only goal in office would be to protect and advance the interests of the United States.” Critics were quick to point out that Baker is a partner at a law firm whose clients include Exxon and its Russian business partner, the Rosneft state oil company. Rice and Gates also have connections to Exxon through their consulting firm, Rice Hadley Gates. But their names still resonated with some of Trump’s most prominent critics”.

It concludes “Tillerson’s nomination will also face a tough campaign from liberals and Democratic pressure groups active on climate change issues. “He and other company executives led ExxonMobil in funding outside groups to create an illusion of scientific uncertainty around the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change,” Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said in a statement. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump promised to draw on top private sector talent to run the country, and on Tuesday said Tillerson’s skills are exactly what Foggy Bottom needs. “His tenacity, broad experience and deep understanding of geopolitics make him an excellent choice for secretary of state,” Trump said in a statement. “Rex knows how to manage a global enterprise, which is crucial to running a successful State Department, and his relationships with leaders all over the world are second to none.”

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he would discuss with Donald Trump the West’s “bad” nuclear deal with Iran after the U.S. president-elect enters the White House. Speaking separately to a conference in Washington, Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry clashed over the Iran deal and Israel’s settlement construction on the occupied West Bank, which Kerry depicted as an obstacle to peace. During the U.S. election campaign, Trump, a Republican, called last year’s nuclear pact a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated”. He has also said it would be hard to overturn an agreement enshrined in a U.N. resolution. “Israel is committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That has not changed and will not change. As far as President-elect Trump, I look forward to speaking to him about what to do about this bad deal,” Netanyahu told the Saban Forum, a conference on the Middle East, in Washington, via satellite from Jerusalem. Trump takes office on Jan. 20″.

A report discusses the recent news about an oil production cut, “OPEC surprised the world by announcing that for the first time in eight years it would cut back oil production to nudge up crude prices. The deal, to start in January, would see OPEC member countries trim their combined oil output by about 1.1 million barrels a day, to 32.5 million barrels of oil a day, according to a statement released after the group’s ministerial meeting on Wednesday”.

The writer goes on to mention “It’s a long-delayed response to a flood of oil that has outstripped global demand for the stuff and kept prices less than half of what they were in 2014. It’s also an indication that OPEC, and especially Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer in the group, is willing to again play a role as market balancer — potentially bringing some longer-term stability back to the global oil market”.

Crucially it notes that “Riyadh, who championed OPEC’s drill-till-you-drop approach two years ago, will take the brunt of the pain, agreeing to an output cut of nearly 500,000 barrels a day from record-high levels of production of 10.673 million barrels a day. Iraq, the cartel’s second-biggest producer, will cut 210,000 barrels a day. In all, OPEC members — famous for their fractiousness and an inability to share the pain — appear to have agreed to trim production by about 5 percent each. Even Russia, which isn’t a member of OPEC but whose breakneck oil production has contributed to the glut, agreed to gradually rein in output by 300,000 barrels a day. In answer, crude oil prices leapt upward by over 10 percent to top $50 a barrel for the first time in a month. While that’s great news for cash-strapped petro states like Iraq and Venezuela — and an early Christmas gift for the U.S. oil patch — it’s a little less cheery for consumers, who will have to pay a bit more at the pump”.

The writer mentions that “Under OPEC’s surprise agreement, one country caught a break: Iran will be allowed to increase production by about 90,000 barrels a day while everyone else cuts back. Tehran has been adamant that it must regain market share that it lost while facing U.S. and Western sanctions that halved its oil exports from 2012 through last year. OPEC’s first agreed cut since 2008 — when oil prices collapsed late in the year after hitting record levels in the summer — comes when the group’s members are reeling. OPEC is on track to earn just $341 billion in oil exports in 2016, down from a record $920 billion in 2012. That has hammered oil-dependent states, making it tougher for Iraq to fight Islamic State, for example, or Venezuela to craft a functioning economy. Even wealthy states, like Saudi Arabia, have felt the pinch, burning through about $180 billion of currency reserves and slashing public-sector salaries in the last two years”.

He goes on to point out, “OPEC’s rediscovery of discipline could be enough to help rebalance the market next year and push up oil prices — if, that is, members actually adhere to it, and if rejuvenated U.S. oil production doesn’t spoil the party before it gets started. OPEC members don’t have a great record of actually sticking to agreements they make. And political feuds between members, notably Saudi Arabia and Iran, had a habit of boiling over into OPEC meetings and torpedoing agreements in the past. “We believe much uncertainty remains with respect to global oil supply in 2017,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners. That’s primarily due to OPEC’s “poor track record of adhering to production quotas and ongoing supply disruptions around the globe,” he added. Another OPEC cut might be needed in the second half of next year, he said. Meanwhile, U.S. oil companies, who need higher crude prices than their Middle Eastern counterparts, have just been waiting for an uptick to drill even more. And thanks to a couple years of belt-tightening, U.S. drillers have gotten great at cutting costs and squeezing out productivity gains, making it easier to thrive in a low-price environment. Renewed U.S. production on the back of rising prices could simply end up prolonging the glut, push prices back down, and end up costing OPEC billions”.

“Pope Francis appealed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a personal letter to ensure that international humanitarian law is respected so that civilians are protected and aid can get to them, the Vatican said on Monday. In the letter, given to Assad by the Vatican ambassador in Damascus, the pope appealed to Assad and the international community for an end to violence and condemned “all forms of extremism and terrorism from whatever quarter they may come”. The letter from the pope, who has made numerous public appeals over the fate of Aleppo, was delivered as a Syrian general said the country’s army and its allies were in the final stages of recapturing the city from rebels. The statement said the pope wrote of his affection for the “sorely tried” people of Syria and appealed to Assad “to ensure that international humanitarian law is fully respected with regard to the protection of the civilians and access to humanitarian aid”. It is not common for the Vatican to release details about private letters the pope sends to world leaders”.

An article discusses the election and Putin’s relationship to it, “From the baroque halls of the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his recent victory in the U.S. presidential election on Wednesday. Broadcast live on state television, Putin calmly read his remarks to a room full of ambassadors that the Russian president had just sworn in and outlined a plan for a political solution to Syria and announced that now that Trump will be in the White House, Russia is ready to restore its ties with Washington. “We heard [Trump’s] campaign rhetoric while still a candidate for the U.S. presidency, which was focused on restoring relations between Russia and the United States,” Putin said. “It’s not our fault that Russian-American relations are in this poor state. But Russia is ready and wants to restore full-fledged relations with the United States.” The televised address capped off what has been an unexpected victory for Putin”.

The piece notes “The Russian president and his country had played an outsized role in the U.S. election cycle, with Trump’s unwavering praise for Putin’s strong style of rule and the role of Russian hacker groups taking centre stage. In Russia, the American vote had also become a centerpiece of broadcasts by state media, which often recited Trump talking points about the election outcome being rigged and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s intention to start a war with Moscow. The Kremlin appeared to shed its anxieties over a Clinton presidency as the Russian parliament burst into applause as news of Trump’s victory speech was relayed to lawmakers. But for Putin, the outcome of the U.S. election is about more than executing Moscow’s strategy of breeding chaos during the presidential election and discrediting America’s political system. Russia’s intervention in Syria, coming on the heels of a deeper crisis triggered by the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea and its involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, put U.S. cooperation with Moscow on the table for U.S. and European policymakers but had few takers in the West. Now after more than two years of biting economic sanctions and international isolation, Putin has a way to restore Russia’s global status and reopen ties with the West — and its name is Donald Trump”.

The author argues “Those in the Kremlin do not “want to own Syria or Ukraine. They want their interests to be taken into account,” Thomas Graham, a managing director at Kissinger Associates and the former senior director for Russia on the U.S. National Security Council from 2004 to 2007, told Foreign Policy. “In a strange way, that entails working with the United States, albeit on terms more favorable to Russia.” And Putin may be able to reach those terms with Trump after he assumes office on Jan. 20, 2017. Throughout the election cycle, Trump made improved cooperation with Moscow a tenet of his campaign and a consistent policy position. The Republican president-elect touted that he will “get along very well” with Putin and showered praise on the Russian leader, calling him a “better leader than Obama.” Other campaign comments indicate that his administration would be willing to roll back Washington’s current support for Ukraine, anti-Assad rebel groups in Syria, and even NATO members — which Trump has criticized for failing to pay their fair share of the costs for their security in Europe. These changes, according to Trump, would be justified by the possibility of enlisting Moscow’s support in the wider fight against the Islamic State and radical Islamic terrorism around the world”.

The writer contends that “In contrast, Hillary Clinton and the prospect of her presidency has been a point of contention in Russia since her term as secretary of state that began 2009 and ended in 2013 with frayed ties between Moscow and Washington. On the campaign trail, the Democratic candidate branded Putin a bully on the international stage and Trump as his puppet. In response, Russia’s state news outlets routinely portrayed Clinton as old, corrupt, and a danger to Moscow and the world. In the lead-up to the U.S. general election, relations between Russia and the United States have hit an all-time low in the 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union with the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine and Moscow’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, Putin has flexed Russia’s power in new and often unpredictable ways: tearing up nuclear agreements, deploying new nuclear-capable missiles to the exclave of Kaliningrad, and buzzing NATO planes and ships with Russian aircraft. And although the Kremlin is certainly encouraged by the prospect of a grand bargain between the United States and Russia, Moscow is still apprehensive about the real estate mogul taking the helm. Because though extending the olive branch to a Trump White House might improve relations with Washington, the Kremlin is aware of the growing anti-Russian sentiment among U.S. policymakers”.

Crucially he argues “It is hardly clear exactly how Trump will make it easier for Putin to advance his goals abroad, but Moscow is certain to capitalise on the turmoil that the unconventional Republican’s victory will sow in world capitals. “It’s better for Russia if the USA is in domestic political crisis, and a Trump victory would underscore exactly such a crisis,” Matthew Rojansky, the director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, told FP. In a search for cracks in the Western facade to exploit, Moscow is likely to try to use confusion over Trump’s victory to breed disunity on U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia. Both Brussels and Washington have renewed sanctions into 2017, but fatigue in Brussels is growing, and it is not assured that the European Union will maintain the economic measures without pressure from Washington. Should the EU sanctions fail to be renewed in January, it would be a massive victory for Putin — ending Russia’s isolation with the West and earning international recognition that the Kremlin has restored Moscow’s global influence lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

He ends “In considering how to rebuild ties with a Trump administration and still balance its strategic interests in the Middle East and Europe, Herbst believes that the Russian president should be wary of “giving the president-elect reason to reconsider the views that he has expressed on NATO and Ukraine.” Moscow still controls the levers to ramp up the bombardment of Aleppo or spark new fighting in eastern Ukraine that could create a headache for President Barack Obama during his final weeks in office. Even now that Trump is slated to transition to the White House, the Kremlin still needs to be prudent about provoking Washington too far”.

“Oil prices on Tuesday fell for the first session since OPEC agreed to cut output last week after data showed crude production rose in most major export regions and on growing skepticism that the cartel would be able to reduce production. After rising over 15 percent over the four sessions since the Nov. 30 OPEC meeting, Brent futures were down $1.25, or 2.3 percent, to $53.69 a barrel at 10:13 a.m. EST (1513 GMT). U.S. crude fell $1.36, or 2.6 percent, to $50.43 a barrel. The Brent front-month has outperformed the U.S. contract since the OPEC meeting, with its premium over WTI reaching $2.29 a barrel earlier on Tuesday, its highest since August. Analysts said the boon from last week’s Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decision has faded as they now look to factors that may undermine the cartel’s promise such as record production, Russia’s plans and the reaction of U.S. shale producers”.

The New York Timesreports that “Trump settled Monday on Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to be his secretary of state, transition officials said. In naming him, the president-elect is dismissing bipartisan concerns that Mr. Tillerson, the globe-trotting leader of an energy giant, has a too-cozy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia. Mr. Trump planned to announce the selection on Tuesday morning, bringing to an end his public and chaotic deliberations over the nation’s top diplomat — a process that at times veered from rewarding Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his most loyal supporters, to musing about whether Mitt Romney, one of his most vicious critics, might be forgiven. Instead, Mr. Trump has decided to risk what looks to be a bruising confirmation fight in the Senate”.

The article mentions that “In the past several days, Republican and Democratic lawmakers had warned that Mr. Tillerson would face intense scrutiny over his two-decade relationship with Russia, which awarded him its Order of Friendship in 2013, and with Mr. Putin. The hearings will also put a focus on Exxon Mobil’s business dealings with Moscow. The company has billions of dollars in oil contracts that can go forward only if the United States lifts sanctions against Russia, and Mr. Tillerson’s stake in Russia’s energy industry could create a very blurry line between his interests as an oilman and his role as America’s leading diplomat.

Mr. Tillerson has been publicly skeptical about the sanctions, which have halted some of Exxon Mobil’s biggest projects in Russia, including an agreement with the state oil company to explore and pump in Siberia that could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on Saturday that Mr. Tillerson’s connections to Mr. Putin were “a matter of concern to me” and promised to examine them closely if he were nominated.

“Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying,” Mr. McCain said on Fox News.

Mr. Trump has fanned speculation about his choice for secretary of state for weeks. In the end, he discarded not only Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney, but also an endlessly changing list that at times included Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee; David H. Petraeus, the former Army general and C.I.A. director; and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and presidential candidate in 2012.

Mr. Romney, Mr. Petraeus and Mr. Corker, the three leading runners-up, all received calls late Monday informing them of Mr. Trump’s decision, according to people familiar with the president-elect’s final choice.

He settled on Mr. Tillerson, a deal maker who has spent the past four decades at Exxon, much of it in search of oil and gas agreements in troubled parts of the world. A native of Wichita Falls, Tex., who speaks with a strong Texas twang, Mr. Tillerson, 64, runs a company with operations in about 50 countries, and has cut deals to expand business in Venezuela, Qatar, Kurdistan and elsewhere.

If confirmed as secretary of state, Mr. Tillerson would face a new challenge: nurturing alliances around the world that are built less on deals and more on diplomacy.

That could prove to be a special test when it comes to Russia, where Mr. Tillerson has fought for years to strengthen connections through business negotiations worth billions of dollars. Under his leadership, Exxon has entered into joint ventures with Rosneft, a Russian-backed oil company, and donated to the country’s health and social programs.

In his new role, Mr. Tillerson would have to manage the difficult relationship between the United States and Mr. Putin’s Russia, including the economic sanctions imposed after Moscow intervened in Ukraine and occupied Crimea. Last month, President Obama and European leaders agreed to keep sanctions in place until Mr. Putin agrees to a cease-fire and to the withdrawal of heavy weapons from front lines in eastern Ukraine.

Other Republicans who have challenged Mr. Tillerson’s potential selection include Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who expressed concern in a Twitter post on Monday about his relationship with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump favored Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, initially, but quickly grew weary of his penchant for drawing outsize media attention. Mr. Trump was also troubled by reports of Mr. Giuliani’s business entanglements overseas. And some of the president-elect’s closest advisers, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, saw Mr. Giuliani as a poor fit for the job.

That led to interest in Mr. Romney, who had called Mr. Trump a “fraud” and a “phony” during the campaign. Mr. Romney had also highlighted Russia as a danger to United States interests during the 2012 race.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Romney made peace, meeting twice and speaking periodically by phone. But some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including his last campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, warned publicly in a series of television interviews that some of his supporters would quickly drift away if Mr. Romney were chosen for the job.

Mr. Tillerson emerged as a contender on the strong recommendations of James A. Baker III, the secretary of state under President George Bush, and Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, according to a person briefed on the process.

“British fighter planes visiting Japan will fly over the South China Sea and Britain will sail aircraft carriers in the Pacific once they are operational in 2020, given concerns about freedom of navigation there, Britain’s ambassador to the United States said on Thursday. The envoy, Kim Darroch, told a Washington think tank that British Typhoon aircraft currently deployed on a visit to Japan would fly across disputed parts of the South China Sea to assert international overflight rights, but gave no time frame. Speaking at an event also attended by Japan’s ambassador to Washington, Darroch said that most future British defense capacity would have to be directed toward the Middle East”.

Boot writes “Trump has made a terrific choice — his best one yet — in choosing retired Gen. James Mattis as his secretary of defense. Mattis is not only a first-rate operational commander who will inspire fear in U.S. enemies and devotion among its troops, but also a serious student of military history and strategy who has thought deeply about issues of war and peace”.

Boot goes on to argue “The only cost in appointing Mattis, along with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as national security advisor, is that it could take David Petraeus out of the running for secretary of state on the theory that the administration can’t have retired generals filling all of the senior national security posts. That would be a mistake. Petraeus would be a superbly qualified secretary of state — one who already has more diplomatic experience than most of those previously selected for this position. He is not, to be sure, the only qualified candidate. Mitt Romney would also be good selection because he is a man of decency and intellect and his selection would show that Trump does not harbour a grudge against those who opposed him during the campaign. If Romney is chosen, one can imagine other qualified critics of Trump being asked to serve in lower-level, if still critical, positions. But of the leading candidates — a list that apparently now includes not just Petraeus and Romney but also Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, and former governor and ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr. — it is the retired general who has the deepest experience in, and knowledge of, world affairs”.

It goes on to point out “Although he spent 37 years in uniform and rose to four-star rank, Petraeus is in some ways not the prototypical general. He is a man, after all, who holds a doctorate in international relations from Princeton and who stood out from his peers for his cerebral approach to his job. One of his signal achievements was producing, along with Mattis, an Army/Marine field manual on counterinsurgency that served as the intellectual blueprint for the surge that he led as the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. He went on to serve as head of Central Command, as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and as director of the CIA. In all of those positions his duties were as much, if not more so, diplomatic and strategic rather than purely military. Having known Petraeus for 13 years — I first met him when he was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul in 2003 — I have been impressed by his sure grasp of all the levers of power, most of them non-kinetic. In Iraq in 2007-2008, he was a virtuoso at getting his message across with American journalists and lawmakers in order to buy himself more time to win the war — while at the same time turning the screws on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to get him to reach out to marginalized Sunnis. He understood that the key terrain of the conflict was in the realms of politics, diplomacy, and communications, not the use of force per se — although he also did not hesitate to use force in a targeted and effective way”.

Boot notes “Later, as head of U.S. Central Command from 2008 to 2010, he became America’s dominant voice in the Middle East, outshining the State Department because of his connections across the region and the credibility that he brought to meetings with military and political leaders. Since leaving the government, Petraeus has maintained a peripatetic global travel schedule as chairman of the KKR Global Institute and a partner at the investment firm. He has also weighed in on many issues far beyond the military realm. For example, he co-chaired a Council on Foreign Relations task force on North America that called for strengthening relations between the United States, Mexico, and Canada — a welcome alternative to the protectionist and xenophobic rhetoric that the president-elect often indulged in during the campaign”.

Boot does not mention his leaking of classified information that detracts from his achievements………

Boot goes on to note “In short, Petraeus is far more than a narrow-minded military man. Indeed, he may not have won Trump over as swiftly and completely in his job interview as Mattis did, because he does not conform to Trump’s cigar-chomping impression of what generals should be like; Petraeus is more in the Eisenhower mold than the Patton mold. That is why no one should be troubled if Petraeus becomes the third general to occupy a senior national-security post. Far from giving a pro-war tilt to the new administration, he would be an important restraint on a president who has spoken far too freely of bombing various countries and of torturing terrorists. The chief knock on Petraeus, aside from the fact that he would be another general, is the unfortunate circumstances under which he was forced out of his CIA job in 2012. He resigned after his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, became public. He subsequently pleaded guilty to two misdemeanour counts of sharing classified information with her, agreeing to spend two years on probation and to pay a $100,000 fine. Many critics are agog that Trump would even consider hiring Petraeus after spending the campaign claiming that Hillary Clinton should be locked up for her mishandling of classified information on her private email account. In truth, both the Clinton and Petraeus cases are minor ones that have nothing in common with the criminal acts of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, both of whom took highly classified information and made it public to the detriment of American national security. There was no public release of any classified information on Petraeus’s (or Clinton’s) part. In fact, Petraeus assigned one of his staff officers, Col. Mike Meese (now a part of the Trump transition team), to ensure that Broadwell, who also had a security clearance, did not reveal anything she wasn’t supposed to in her book”.

Boot ends “It is telling that Snowden is now claiming in an interview from Moscow, eagerly promoted by the Kremlin’s propaganda organs, that Petraeus’s transgressions were more serious than his own. That simply isn’t so — it’s like comparing jaywalking with bank robbery — but that Snowden is saying so suggests that the Kremlin does not want to see the secretary of state position go to someone who would be expected to stand up to Vladimir Putin’s aggression. No doubt Putin would be more comfortable with a candidate like Rex Tillerson who, as the Wall Street Journal notes, has “some of the closest ties among U.S. CEO’s to Mr. Putin and Russia.” Petraeus has already paid a price for his transgression that goes well beyond his guilty plea on a misdemeanor. He lost his CIA post and he was subjected to public humiliation, which is especially painful for someone who has always valued his well-earned reputation for rectitude. It would be overkill if Petraeus’s one-time error were to forever disqualify him from public service. He still has much to offer a country that he has spent most of his life serving. As secretary of state he could follow capably in the footsteps of his hero, Gen. George C. Marshall.

“Thai Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, 64, has become the country’s new king, succeeding his much-revered late father King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He accepted the throne in a televised broadcast following an invitation from parliament, formalising his accession. King Bhumibol, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, died on 13 October. The late king was widely seen as a pillar of stability during seven decades of political turmoil in Thailand. The crown prince had been expected to become the next king the day after his father’s death, but Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha at the time said that he had asked to delay the official proclamation so he could mourn.

A piece notes how Catholics in France are backing the presidential contender, “François Fillon will carry the standard for Les Républicains in France’s presidential election next spring. Competitors and commentators — indeed, many voters — were surprised by this outcome. Surprised because Fillon had long trailed in the polls; surprised because Fillon, a former prime minister, was long dismissed as the “eternal No. 2”; surprised because Fillon has promised, if elected, to starve the beast that the French fondly call l’état providence — the welfare state — a move that in France has not typically been a winning campaign strategy. But surprised, too, because, as the rest of the country is now discovering, Fillon is Catholic. Very Catholic. So Catholic, at least to the secular left, that a headline in the newspaper Libérationscreamed: “Help, Jesus has returned!” Fillon has never made any secret of his beliefs. He hails from the Vendée, the western region that was the site of a long and bloody resistance to the secular values, laws, and, ultimately, soldiers of revolutionary Paris. A lieu de mémoire, or site of memory, for French Catholics, the Vendée is famed for the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, where Fillon goes every year on retreat”.

It mentions that “In his campaign book Faire (“To Make”), Fillon, known for his reticence, nevertheless recalls with deep emotion his Catholic schooling, explains how it has shaped his worldview, and affirms: “I was raised in this tradition, and I have kept this faith.” And, as it turns out, legions of Frenchmen and women who have not kept their faith will nonetheless turn out in droves for a politician who has. These men and women are, in the controversial term coined three years ago by the sociologists Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras, les zombies catholiques of France. In their book Le mystère français, Todd and Le Bras tried to explain why, in a country where barely five citizens in 100 attend church, the weight of Catholicism is still evident. From the millions of parents who took to the streets in the mid-1980s to protest the Socialist government’s effort to merge private (and overwhelmingly Catholic) schools with public schools to the millions who, 30 years later, took to the same streets to protest the new (but hardly different) Socialist government’s effort to legalize gay marriage, these armies of French “zombies” would have overwhelmed the likes of Brad Pitt, let alone government ministers”.

The report notes that “But this is less World War Z than the newest chapter in the guerres franco-françaises — France’s long series of civil wars fought over the legacy of the French Revolution, which pit a secularist left against a traditionalist right. Todd and Le Bras marvel over the persistence of Catholic habits and values in regions where Catholicism has more or less vanished as an institution. “The most astonishing paradox,” they note, “is the rise of social movements shaped by a religion that has disappeared as a metaphysical belief.” Unable to resist the French weakness for paradox, Todd and Le Bras conclude: “Catholicism seems to have attained a kind of life after death. But since it is a question of a this-worldly life, we will define it as ‘zombie Catholicism.’” Zombie Catholics share certain symptoms: Not only do they hail from regions where resistance was greatest to the French Revolution, but they also have taken advantage of the benefits that flowed from that seismic event. Highly educated and meritocratic, they also privilege a traditional ordering of professional and domestic duties between husbands and wives; strong attachment to social, community, and family activities; and a general wariness over the role of the state in private and community affairs, including “free schools” (Catholic private schools)”.

Crucially the writer notes how “Fillon can check all of these boxes. His economic liberalism, in particular, has led critics to label him a French Margaret Thatcher. But Fillon’s genius was his recognition that France’s zombie Catholicism isn’t just a cultural identity but also a latent political one. Indeed, the zombies came out to vote for him in greater numbers than anyone had anticipated: In the second round of the primary, more than 4.3 million individuals went to the polls. For a party that had never before chosen a presidential candidate by primary, this was a stunning success. (It is important to note that the primary was partly open: Anyone who paid 2 euros and declared they held to right-wing or centrist values was allowed to cast a vote. Although estimates vary of the percentage of those from the left and center who voted, pollsters attribute the second swell of voters to those mobilized by Fillon’s candidacy.) Equally stunning is how the electoral map dovetails with the sociological map traced by Todd and Le Bras. For example, the Vendée and Brittany, the western regions that formed Fillon, are among what the authors call the most “anthropologically hardened” zombie Catholic enclaves — places where the church has vanished but its practices and values persist. Voters from these parts of France also rallied in greater numbers than elsewhere to Fillon, while in those regions identified by Todd and Le Bras as “anthropologically hardened” liberal enclaves — especially in the south, much of Paris (and the former “red belt” that surrounds it), and other large cities — voter turnout was significantly smaller. According to Jérôme Fourquet, the director of opinion and business strategies for French pollster IFOP, the takeaway was clear: Catholic, or at least zombie Catholic, voters played a “disproportionate” role in the primary”.

It goes on to mention how “Just how Catholic Fillon will remain during his campaign remains to be seen, but all signs point to his beliefs being both sincere and deeply held. When the French political scene was upended in 2012 by the monumental clash over the legalisation of same-sex marriage, Fillon never hid his opposition. Once the legislation was passed, Fillon acknowledged that the law must be respected, but he has also repeatedly voiced his opposition to the law’s so-called “excesses,” by which he means the right of same-sex couples to either adopt or use a surrogate mother. His hostility to the law attracted the support of Sens Commun (“Common Sense”), a deeply conservative Catholic organization tied to La Manif Pour Tous (“Protest for Everyone”), the political movement that led the massive protests against the same-sex marriage law. Frigide Barjot, the former leader of La Manif Pour Tous and a controversial figure, appeared at Fillon’s headquarters Sunday night to celebrate his victory. Fillon’s personal opposition to abortion — “Given my own faith, I cannot approve of abortion,” he said in early October — has also sent ripples of concern across the political spectrum”.

The piece contends “Equally unsettling have been Fillon’s remarks on Islam. Though not as provocative as Nicolas Sarkozy, who relentlessly played the “identity card” during his campaign, Fillon has nevertheless underscored what he considers to be the unprecedented challenge Islam poses for France. He insists on France’s “Christian roots,” a statement critics denounce as an implicit warning to French Muslims that they are not chez soi in France. He has claimed that there is a “concrete problem with radical Islam,” immediately adding, afterward, that “Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, and Sikhs do not threaten our national unity.” Not surprisingly, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France issued a warning about Fillon’s candidacy, declaring that anti-Islamic remarks made by Fillon spokeswoman Valerie Boyer — most notably, that only Muslim extremists wear headscarves — represented “a small taste of what to expect” from a Fillon presidency”.

Naturally “the centre and left, the takeaway from all this has been panic: It is as if real zombies have invaded France. Some of the headlines in French media following Fillon’s primary win were nearly as apocalyptic as those in the United States following Donald Trump’s victory. When not stammering over the large cross Boyer wore during a press conference, the co-owner of the left-leaning Le Monde newspaper, Pierre Bergé, tweeted that Fillon’s supporters were no better than the Pétainists of Vichy France. As for Le Monde itself, an editorialist observed, simply, that Fillon’s victory revealed “the emergence of a Catholic and patrimonial right.” And yet, given the lamentable state of the Socialists, bled white by infighting and tied to the most unpopular president in the history of the Fifth Republic, Fillon seems likely to be the only thing standing between France and a National Front presidency in next spring’s election. The question now is whether he will be able to convince voters from the center and left to overcome their worries about his religion and his austere economic plans”.

It ends “It’s also an open question whether French Catholics — zombie and non-zombie alike — will maintain their own resistance to the National Front’s anti-Europe, anti-Muslim, and anti-liberal siren call. Fillon does seem to have harnessed what the religion specialist Henri Tincq calls “identity Catholicism.” Those Frenchmen and women, he said, “uneasy with a modernity that has largely erased Christian values from issues like education, family, work, and sexuality,” and increasingly ill at ease with transnational institutions like the EU and the transnational flow of peoples — especially when they are Muslim and hail from the Middle East — have increasingly been retreating to the ostensible safety of traditionally national institutions like the Catholic Church. Fillon is now offering them what seems to be a compelling political alternative to the sclerotic secularism of the left and unsavory heritage of the extreme right. But if this activation of Catholic identity already marks a shift in French politics, its ultimate significance is not yet clear. Much depends on the long-term direction taken by the newly awakened horde of zombie Catholics. Will they retreat further to the right and into the arms of the National Front? The late and great historian of French politics René Rémond always insisted that the more observant French Catholics are, the less likely they are to vote for the National Front. But this truism has, with time, frayed dramatically; moreover, it never applied to the zombies to start with. An IFOP poll taken after last year’s regional elections revealed that 32 percent of practicing Catholics voted for the National Front. Not only was this higher than the national average — 28 percent — of National Front voters, but it was also more than double the percentage of Catholic votes tallied for the party in 2014. As a headline in the Catholic magazine Pélerinannounced, the “Catholic dam is collapsing.”

It concludes “The same poll revealed, however, that western France, Fillon’s homeland, continued to resist the National Front’s rise. Many Catholics, regardless of their religious practice, continue to feel repugnance in voting for a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, thrived on values they consider antithetical to their worldview. But it bears noting that his daughter, Marine Le Pen, continues to reinvent the National Front, also known by its French name Front National or FN. It was no accident that when Le Pen the younger recently replaced the traditional logo of the blue-white-and-red flame of the National Front with a blue rose, she also removed the very names “Le Pen” and “Front National” from the party’s graphics. Now, her public appearances are framed by “Marine” and “Au nom du peuple.” (“In the name of the people.”) As one of her advisors remarked, “Marine Le Pen is not the candidate of the FN but of all Frenchmen and women.” Fillon may have ridden a wave of the undead to victory in the primary. It remains to be seen, however, whether the Catholics — dead and undead alike — will stick by his side this spring.

“The director of the CIA has warned US President-elect Donald Trump that ending the Iran nuclear deal would be “disastrous” and “the height of folly”. In a BBC interview, John Brennan also advised the new president to be wary of Russia’s promises, blaming Moscow for much of the suffering in Syria. In his campaign, Mr Trump threatened to scrap the Iran deal and also hinted at working more closely with Russia. Mr Brennan will step down in January after four years leading the CIA. In the first interview by a CIA director with the British media, John Brennan outlined a number of areas where he said the new administration needed to act with “prudence and discipline” – these included the language used regarding terrorism, relations with Russia, the Iran nuclear deal and the way in which the CIA’s own covert capabilities were employed”.

A report note the gay rights progress in Taiwan, “October 2014, a crowd at an LGBT rights rally in Taipei, one of many, lobbed four large red balloons emblazoned with the Chinese characters for marriage equality into the fenced courtyard of Taiwan’s legislature. At that time, a comfortable majority of Taiwanese supported same-sex marriage; a number of polls in the self-governing island of 23 million indicated as much, with one showing as many as 71 percent in favour. But several initiatives to amend the law to achieve marriage equality, first mooted in 2003, have not been successful. Two years later, three marriage equality bills now sit on legislators’ desks; although international mediahave been quick to announce that Taiwan stands on the cusp of being the first government in Asia to achieve marriage equality, the island’s public seems deeply divided. In the latest poll on the subject, released on Nov. 29, 46 percent of respondents supported marriage equality, while 45 percent opposed it. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s lawmakers and its civil society have been more cautious than recent headlines in Western media suggest”.

It adds “Island-wide marriage equality initiatives have been unsuccessful in spite of growing support over decades. Even without national legislation, many local governments in Taiwan now allow same-sex couples to participate in collective weddings and to record their partnership in household registries across the island, although neither action confers any legal rights. To many, the election of President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in January portended a broader, deeper change. Tsai openly made statements that appeared to support marriage equality during and after her campaign. In an October 2015 Facebook video posted to coincide with Taipei’s annual LGBT pride parade, Tsai exclaimed, “Everyone is equal before love.” A year later, she posted a photo on her Facebook page showing a rainbow, adding that her “belief has not changed” post-election. In August, Tsai appointed the first transgender official in government, Audrey Tang, as executive councilor for digital policy, which looked like another step toward acceptance of different gender norms”.

The piece notes “Since Tsai took office this May, pressure has been building on her to deliver. Yet she has never explicitly promised that her administration would push for same-sex marriage legislation, and critics have feared that once in office, she would find herself unable to follow through on her progressive rhetoric. The party that Tsai leads, the DPP, “has neither devoted sufficient resources to communicate the issues of marriage equality nor to reconcile differences within the party,” Victoria Hsu, who heads the nonprofit Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR), told Foreign Policy. It was therefore a setback when Justice Minister Chiu Tai-san announced in August that his ministry still intended to introduce its own same-sex partnership bill — but only in 2017, after studying the impact of such a law on Taiwanese society. (In Taiwan, ministries can introduce bills into the legislature.) The effort dates back to the previous, more socially conservative Kuomintang (KMT) administration of Ma Ying-jeou and is an attempt to compromise between supporters of marriage equality and religious groups opposed. Proposing a separate law for same-sex partnership is politically easier, as it leaves the institution of marriage as currently constituted unchanged”.

Not surprisingly it notes “In the absence of strong top-down leadership on the issue from Tsai, momentum for the bills currently under consideration has come from the bottom up. Audrey Ko, the chief editor of Womany, an online media outlet focused on gender issues and LGBT rights, says a stigma remains for gays and lesbians in Taiwan, one her company seeks to dispel. Other organizations, such as the Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBT) Hotline Association, perform peer counseling and advocacy work. Even corporations are chipping in; in March, McDonald’s released a commercial in which a son comes out to his father in one of its restaurants. (The father accepts it.) This summer, a number of Taiwanese pop artists organized a benefit concert to raise awareness for marriage equality; tickets sold out in minutes. Pop superstar Jolin Tsai performed a lesbian-themed song for the occasion. In the music video for the song “We’re All Different, Yet the Same,” she makes the case for marriage equality by describing the plight of a woman whose partner of more than 30 years is hospitalized; the woman is unable to sign a consent form for emergency surgery because she is legally not a spouse or family member”.

It points out that “A real-life version of this tragedy triggered public outcry and reinvigorated support for marriage equality. On Oct. 16, 67-year-old French professor Jacques Picoux fell to his death from the top of a 10-story building in Taipei, police said. He is thought to have committed suicide after depression caused by the death of his partner due to cancer; Picoux was unable to make medical decisions for his partner in his final days, as Picoux had no legal status. In a response to this outcry, legislators from the DPP and the KMT, as well as the caucus of the New Power Party (NPP), a young activist organization, all introduced similar marriage equality bills. All three proposals would amend the Taiwan Civil Code to open marriage to same-sex couples, but they differ in how to do so. DPP legislator Yu Mei-nu’s proposal introduces a general provision extending to same-sex couples the right to marriage, as well as other family law rights that accompany married status. But it leaves further gendered language across the civil code intact. The proposals of KMT legislator Hsu Yu-ren and the NPP would make references to “husband and wife” and “father and mother” gender-neutral throughout all relevant civil code provisions. These latter two proposals have great symbolic meaning, because they remove a heterosexual presumption from the code, but the legal effect is likely no different than Yu’s proposal”.

It mentions “There is still a long legislative road to travel before Taiwan can become the first Asian government to legalize same-sex marriage. The bills passed their first reading on Nov. 17, but the DPP caucus whip has said the proposed bills will next be reviewed on Dec. 26. During the review process, any legislator can introduce a competing same-sex partnership act. Even if the bills were to enter a second reading, they could still face a boycott and be removed from the agenda. The bills will only become legislation after passing three readings. As these bills went through their first reading in the legislature this month, thousands of people protesting against marriage equality, and only several hundred rallying for it, gathered on Taipei’s streets. Opposition to marriage equality in Taiwan largely comes from small but well-organized and vocal conservative religious groups. Four people reportedly even managed to storm into the legislative meeting room, shouting that the “legislators are monsters” and would want to change Taiwan “into an AIDS island.” It is hard to tell whether the legislature will pass a same-sex marriage bill this time, says Hsu of TAPCPR, partly because of internal opposition within the DPP and KMT. (The NPP caucus fully supports its bill but only holds five seats in legislature.) Tsai has reiterated that the bills are “clear evidence” marriage equality has support across all parties. But even Yu, who introduced the DPP bill, says she is only cautiously optimistic about the chances of passing a marriage equality law”.

It concludes “Outside lawmakers’ offices, the battle for public support continues. If anything, it seems to be waning precisely at the time when it will be most needed. “More and more people are confessing that they love gays but that they don’t support same-sex marriage,” said Ko, because they believe allowing same-sex partners to get married will harm traditional family values. She is therefore unsure whether Taiwan will manage to pass a bill in the next year. At least, Ko added, “people are talking [about it], and it is not a taboo anymore.”

“The Senate and House armed services committees have agreed upon a compromise National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 that prioritizes higher personnel and readiness levels over procurement of ships and aircraft. Senior armed services committee aides told reporters this afternoon that their compromise bill includes $3.2 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) spending aimed at adding 16,000 soldiers, 4,000 airmen and 3,000 Marines to the force. That money covers not only the military personnel costs associated with the higher force but also increased operations and maintenance costs. “One of the things that we were really focused on was getting after the readiness issues,” an aide said. “All that money went to readiness issues, particularly in the area of end strength,” with an eye specifically towards “operations and support for Air Force and Marine Corps aviation readiness shortfalls.” Marine and Navy aviation leaders have said that barriers to rebuilding readiness go beyond just funding for personnel and flight hours and also include a lack of spare parts to keep planes ready, a backlog of planes at depot maintenance facilities and other logistics and maintenance-related issues. The armed services committee aides said money was reallocated within the base budget, keeping within the Bipartisan Budget Agreement spending caps, to increase funding for aviation spares and maintenance to further help boost aviation readiness.

A piece discusses the number of generals Trump is appointing, “In the 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s second term, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (A), National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (B), and Secretary of Defense William Cohen (C) would meet weekly for what was called the “ABC lunch.” When the rest of us minions gathered in the White House Situation Room for one crisis or problem or another, we always had the sense that the agenda was kind of fixed, with the statements of the principals a choreographed ballet reflecting agreements already reached at that lunch table. If current trends from President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees continue, the new lunch crowd may all be senior generals in the U.S. military. With National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn now joined by Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis, and both Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. John Kelly being considered as a possible secretary of state, three of the five institutions most centrally involved in U.S. national security policy could be headed by former senior military officers. That would be an unprecedented event in American history, a serious challenge to the tradition of civilian control over the military, and a danger to U.S. national security”.

The piece notes that “This dominance of U.S. national security policy by retired general officers is a trend long in the making, but Trump’s appointees would seal the deal, upsetting the delicate balance of civil-military power in U.S. foreign-policy institutions. Since the start of the Cold War, and particularly in the shaping of a containment policy that emphasized the growth and use of military force (largely at the hand of Paul Nitze in National Security Council memorandum 68 in 1950), the Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, military service chiefs, and combatant commanders have become the 800-pound gorillas of U.S. foreign-policy making. Arguably, the last secretary of state to articulate U.S. national security strategy was John Foster Dulles. Since then, no secretary of state has led the development of national security policy, whereas the Defense Department has regularly trotted out a National Defense Strategy and the Joint Chiefs a National Military Strategy. The gap between the money and people available to the civilian foreign-policy institutions has grown exponentially, with defense budgets running as much as 12 times that for civilian foreign-policy engagement. The responsibility for dealing with international tensions and conflicts is still embedded in a Cold War context. U.S. security assistance support to other countries, while nominally channeled through the State Department budget, is almost entirely designed and implemented by the military services and defense contractors. The exceptional ex-general that proves the rule, Dwight Eisenhower, who happened to be president, was concerned about the rising influence of the Defense Department and the military in U.S. policy and society, leading to his coining of the term “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 Farewell Address, though very little changed, as a result”.

It mentions “In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the expansion of military responsibility for U.S. national security policy and international engagement has grown exponentially. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan turned the U.S. military into an occupying power, with a broad expansion of the role the armed services played in foreign-policy making and implementation. As governance and development became military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, money for security assistance in those two countries — plus Jordan, Pakistan, and, eventually, dozens of countries around the world — flowed into the Pentagon. The Defense Department deliberately sought a wide expansion of its statutory authorities to provide foreign and military assistance, programs historically the responsibility of the State Department under the Foreign Assistance Act. From Iran to Iraq to the “war on terrorism,” the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been largely left in the dust, both in terms of budgets and responsibilities. Flynn, Mattis, and the other generals who may emerge at the top of Trump’s policy machine were all involved in this expansion of authority and in these wars. Why should we care? If they are competent individuals, so the argument goes, it shouldn’t matter if they were military men once upon a time, right? Aren’t generals the best people for these jobs, given the troubled world we live in? No and no. There are four reasons why the emergence of generals at the top of U.S. national security policy is a bad idea for the United States”.

It posits “First, these appointments break an important tradition of separation between civilians and the military in U.S. governance. Although some military officers have ended up in politics (Ulysses S. Grant, Eisenhower, among others), it is uncommon; as Samuel Huntington emphasized in his classic 1957 study of U.S. civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State: “The military officer must remain neutral politically.… The antithesis of objective civilian control is military participation in politics: civilian control decreases as the military become progressively involved in institutional, class, and constitutional politics.” There has been a history of struggle over this principle, but Huntington’s point is that policymakers and particularly the president are best served when generals stick to their profession and provide their best military advice to the civilians, who are in charge of making policy decisions. Putting a gaggle of military men at the apex of policy (and not just military policy) advice to the president simply sets that foundational principle aside. The second reason begins with a caveat: There is ample evidence that having military officers at the policymaking table is important and that they are frequently conservative about the use of military force. Indeed, generals are well-educated in strategy but not particularly in statecraft — the combination of the tools a competent head of state needs to have at his or her disposal when engaging the world. When generals talk strategy, they are talking deterrence and the conduct of combat, not about the “other means” in Carl von Clausewitz’s classical formulation. Sitting atop the State Department does not suddenly make a general an expert in diplomacy”.

He points out “The fundamental bias — and a necessary bias — of trained officers is to create a military and to advise civilians about the contribution of that military to national security policy. It is a military mindset, a necessary part of their professional expertise, and borne of years of training and education. But it is not a balanced view of how the United States should engage the world. As such, the military paradigm is likely to be the dominant narrative, to the detriment of broader thinking about statecraft. That paradigm focuses on solutions to tactical and strategic problems but not on the nuances of managing intractable international issues. One can readily imagine the starting point to a conversation among generals about the Syrian crisis being about the application of greater or lesser U.S. military force, rather than the tools of diplomacy or negotiation. But that’s an easy one. Is the answer to Nigerian instability and the scourge of Boko Haram further deployment of U.S. forces, training, and weaponry — or a deeper engagement in civil institutions and placing pressure on the Nigerian regime to eliminate corruption and establish effective governance? Is the key to dealing with China’s assertive presence in the South China Sea an aggressive U.S. military buildup in the Pacific or a diplomatic strategy that deals with the surrounding countries and seeks to resolve the most contentious issues? It’s not that the generals are ignorant, but simply that diplomacy is not their stock in trade nor what they’ve spent their lives thinking about and planning for. The differences may appear slight, but they send U.S. global engagement in two very different directions”.

He adds “Third, despite the widespread public respect for the military, the United States has yet to confront the reality that after 15 years of using armed forces to establish order and security in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against terrorist organizations, the record is largely one of failure. Americans live with a myth that the military is the only effective “can-do” organization and that failure in missions such as Iraq and Afghanistan was only because the military was not tasked with doing more. But a decade of training, assistance, and governance support in Iraq led directly to a regime that was nearly overwhelmed by the Islamic State. Afghanistan teeters on the edge of takeover by a combination of Taliban and warlords. And the aggressive, invasive counterterrorism effort in more than 80 countries, led by a more militarized CIA and U.S. special operations forces, may have killed a lot of people but has resulted in the death of not one terrorist organization that existed before 9/11. In fact, it has arguably stimulated their growth and the expansion in the number of terrorist attacks. This history of failures has gone unremarked; the Defense Department and the services continue to whistle through the graveyard of buried policies, rearranging the next step as if it were the first, and patting themselves on the back as heroes for what they have accomplished”.

Pointedly he argues “Despite his campaign rhetoric about firing generals, President-elect Trump is on the verge of rewarding the very same men he recently derided for a “can’t-do” record. But the rest of the world knows well the failures. They are a result of local incompetence, the inability of military personnel to carry out nonmilitary tasks, institutional inflexibility, and, most basically, an abiding ignorance about the difficulty of changing another country through the use of force. Trying harder doesn’t do it better; trying harder has the tragic outcome of reinforcing a record of failure and alienating the very populations the strategy is designed to help. And finally, the continued recourse to military officers as the answer to our national security needs makes the imbalance at the heart of American statecraft a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we act as if the military is the best instrument of statecraft, the more we reinforce the notion that civilians are not competent to carry out national security policy. Moreover, the most difficult long-term national security issues we face, like climate change, are not easily susceptible to military solutions”.

He ends “Civilian control over the military is a fundamental value of our democracy. Generals — even retired ones — should advise, not make policy. A successful national security policy depends on restoring the civil-military balance that has been lost in the lopsided approach of the last 15 years, one that has clearly failed to the detriment of U.S. security. Our civilian national security institutions need reinforcement to help restore that balance; but with two generals in place and a possible third to come, it is very late in the day to restore this important equity”.

“Iran’s chief of staff of the armed forces said Saturday that Tehran may be interested in setting up naval bases in both Syria and Yemen, the semi-official Tasnim reported. “Maybe, at some point we will need bases on the shores of Yemen and Syria,” the report by Tasnim quoted Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri as saying. “Having naval bases in remote distances is not less than nuclear power,” he said. “It is ten times more important and creates deterrence.” Gen. Bagheri added that setting up naval platforms off the shores of those countries requires “infrastructures there first.” He said Iran is also able to set up permanent platforms for military purposes in the Persian Gulf and roving ones in other places.

An excellent article in the Economist rejects the view that Germany will become the leader in liberal international globalism after Trump takes office, “To visit Berlin is to be confronted at every turn by reminders of the evils that Germans do. Memorials to the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities dot the city. In Kreuzberg, a scruffy-but-hip neighbourhood, posters and leaflets denounce milder German iniquities, from urban gentrification to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a hated trade deal between the European Union and America that the election of Donald Trump may have killed for good. Outside Germany, though, Mr Trump’s victory has left disaffected liberals gasping for German benevolence. Brexit, the refugee crisis and the rise of drawbridge-up populists across Europe had already punctured the West’s self-confidence. Now, after an election campaign in which Mr Trump trashed immigrants, vowed to rewrite trade deals and threatened to withdraw America’s security guarantee, the West’s indispensable nation appears to have dispensed with itself. Desperate for a candidate to accept the mantle of leader of the free world, some alighted on Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor”.

The writer points out that “It is easy to see why. Unflappable and patient, dedicated to the freedom she had thrust upon her as a young East German physicist in 1989, Mrs Merkel is a beacon to those who fear the flickering of the liberal flame. She likes markets, trade and good governance. Her commitment to helping refugees fleeing strife in Syria contrasts with the anti-migrant turn elsewhere in Europe. Mr Trump’s victory should extinguish any speculation that Mrs Merkel will not seek a fourth term as chancellor next year in Germany’s federal election; expect an announcement soon. Yet anyone expecting Germany to fill America’s shoes will be disappointed. Consider Mrs Merkel’s approach to crisis management, from the euro to Ukraine to refugees. Each played out differently, but Mrs Merkel’s prevarication was consistent: humming and hawing over bail-outs for indebted governments; taking Vladimir Putin at his word before realising he was a liar; reacting to the refugee surge rather than trying to prevent it. For those seeking stability, Mrs Merkel’s taste for hesitation may be a feature, not a bug, but it hardly makes for bold leadership”.

He correctly notes “Nor does German assertiveness inside Europe run smoothly. Seventy years after the second world war, protestors in Greece and Spain who resent Germany’s strict approach to fiscal stewardship still resort to Nazi tropes. The occasional attempt to form “anti-austerity” (read: anti-German) axes inside the EU elicits terror in Berlin. The world’s progressives may have loved it, but some in Berlin were uneasy at the chiding tone of Mrs Merkel’s letter of congratulation to Mr Trump, which pledged co-operation on the basis of a commitment to liberal values. “We are protected by our terrible history,” says Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister. “You cannot say, ‘Make Germany Great Again’.” More importantly, Pax Americana has always required American bite. Germany, with a defence budget one-fifteenth that of the United States, no nuclear deterrent and an instinct for pacifism, has neither the ability nor the aspiration to act as the world’s liberal hegemon. This is a country that went through agonies over whether to arm Iraqi Kurds battling Islamic State. Inside Europe, let alone elsewhere, only France and Britain have the ability to project power, and that suits Germans fine. Put bluntly, if Mr Putin’s tanks roll into the Baltics it will not be the Bundeswehr that takes the lead in rolling them back”.

Rightly he points out that “Mrs Merkel’s ambitions are altogether smaller. First among them is to hold together the fracturing EU, via a blend of prayer and policy. Germany is pinning its hopes on France, its eternal partner inside the EU, electing a sane president next year—ideally Alain Juppé, the centre-right front-runner. Franco-German comity should help EU governments find common ground on defence co-operation, the focus of their efforts over the next few months. (Mr Trump’s questionable commitment to NATO should provide another spur.) Should the politics prove propitious, Germany may one day be open to more ambitious schemes, such as greater integration of the euro zone. But grand visions of EU institutional change, let alone a German-led reshaping of the world order, are off the menu in Berlin. The priority is stopping the rot. Meanwhile Mrs Merkel, her political capital depleted by the refugee crisis, must hold the line at home. Owing in part to the rise of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the coalition that emerges from next year’s election will probably command a Bundestag majority far smaller than the one Mrs Merkel’s centrist grand coalition enjoys today. That will limit the chancellor’s room for manoeuvre, at home and in Europe. The political fragmentation is also disinterring old questions about Germany’s geopolitical allegiance. The Westbindung (Western integration), a staple of German foreign policy since Adenauer, is fraying as extremist parties on the left and right cosy up to Russia”.

He concludes “And what about Mr Trump? For now, Germany retains a touching faith in America’s institutions to rein in the president-elect’s worst impulses. But from his vicious campaign to the chaotic management of his transition, there is every sign that Mr Trump will prove to be another of the erratic politicians, like Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, who have tested Mrs Merkel’s patience. Russia is a particular worry. If Mr Trump abandons Ukraine and allows America’s sanctions to wither, Mrs Merkel’s task of maintaining European unity will become almost impossible. Germany’s stake in the global liberal order is immense. Its export-led economic model relies on robust international trade; its political identity is inexorably linked to a strong EU; its westward orientation assumes a friendly and engaged America. All of these things may now be in jeopardy, and Germany would suffer more than most from their demise. But do not look to Mrs Merkel to save them, for she cannot do so alone”.